Director of Data & Research

Versatile is an innovative AI-driven construction intelligence startup committed to transforming the construction industry with cutting-edge technology. Our mission is to enhance construction projects’ efficiency, safety, and productivity through intelligent solutions.

About the job:

Versatile is a construction tech company that aims to help customers use data and insight to revolutionize their industry. As such, you will lead a core pillar in materializing our vision and build it for the future. The position will include building, strengthening, and scaling a multidisciplinary group of Data Scientists, Data and BI engineers, and data analysts.

You will be a member of our R&D leadership forum and report directly to our VP of R&D.

Most of your time will go towards people management, technical leadership, cross-functional alignment and communication, and enhancing our culture of excellence. You will technically direct the work of people in your group, act as a technical escalation point, and feel comfortable stepping in and making hands-on individual contributions when needed.

You will constantly balance between your passions for leading people and facilitating their personal growth, your impact-driven mindset, and your desire to ship a product that makes a real difference and caters to the needs of our users and our business, and your passion for spreading out your technical proficiency.

What you will be doing:

• On the people management side – you will lead Data and BI engineers, Data Analysts, and Data Scientists. You’ll mentor and work with your team members to build their personal and professional work paths.
• As a leader, you will demonstrate strong technical leadership based on your hands-on experience and proficiency. Your technical background and experience may rest more on the Data Engineering side with some level of previous exposure to Data Science, or vice versa. You will translate data science needs into data platform requirements.
• On the technical leadership side, you will direct the work of others and review architecture, design, and code. You will also work with your people to build, groom, and advance a technical backlog, maintain a balance between product progress and technical excellence, and act as an escalation point for making technical decisions.
• Up to 30% of your time will be dedicated to technical contributions, such as feature planning, architecture and design, and the occasional code contribution.
• On the cross-function side, you will work closely with our product managers as an empowered unit to cater to our users’ needs and progress our business KPIs. You will also work closely with other team leads to improve alignment and visibility and ensure we ship often and early.
• You will also work closely with all extended team members – engineers (devs and QA), product, UX, program managers, operations, management, etc.- to ensure we continuously learn, improve, and drive our product and engineering organization to excellence.
• Your team’s Definition of done will always be driven by the fact that their work lies in the hands of users and impacts the company’s goals.

Requirements:

• At least 8 years of experience in Data Engineering, Business Intelligence, or Data Science.
• At least 3 years of proven experience leading and mentoring developers and engineers as a Manager (Team Lead or over) or Architect. The ideal candidate will have already led a team of 5 multidisciplinary individual contributors or more.
• At least 2 years of technical proficiency in leading engineering work over one of the significant commercial data platforms/data lakes (e.g., Databricks, Snowflake, BigQuery).
• The ideal candidate will have either built, released, and iterated over significant DS solutions or has led the implementation and adoption of a platform in an existing R&D department.
• Experience catering heavily to algorithmic and ML initiatives through direct leadership of teams that have built and deployed models to production environments or through closely servicing such teams.
• A proven track record of managing complex data projects through the entire project lifecycle.
• Experienced with participating in architecture discussion forums, where questions of domain ownership are discussed, and solutions are set out to use data platforms, micro-services, or cloud-native solutions per-need basis. Experience with AWS is preferred.
• An academic degree in quantitative fields such as Computer science, Mathematics, Statistics, Engineering, or parallel work experience. Candidates whose academic background was in other scientific fields, and whose career path has led them toward Data Science will also be considered.
• A strong product and business-driven mentality and substantial experience in acting as the technical counterpart in an empowered team.
• Experienced with high event architectures, previous experience with Kafka is a plus.