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About Brilliant
Brilliant is making a world of great problem solvers. We focus on adults learning quantitative skills – especially in math, data, and CS/AI – and deliver a best-in-class interactive learning experience across web and apps. Our courses teach you what you need to know, while skipping the stuff you don’t – so expect more about solving equations, statistical analysis, logical deduction, neural networks, and generative AI, and less about abstract theorems and integrating complicated trig functions.
We serve hundreds of thousands of paid subscribers, and we’re hoping you might be the right person to contribute to accelerating our footprint to millions of customers (and changed lives). In addition to what’s below, you can see all open roles and learn more about our team culture on our careers page.
We have always prioritized building a healthy business as the backbone of achieving our mission. We are default alive (will be profitable before needing to raise), have never had layoffs, are growing new customers at an exciting pace (high double-digits year-over-year). Our investors are top-tier + mission aligned, and we’ve kept our valuations tethered to reality – we aren’t playing “catch up” like many others.
In our day-to-day, we value adventure, excellence, generosity, and candor. We are optimists in the face of uncertainty, we take pride in our work, we go the extra mile for each other, and we tell it like it is (the good and the bad). We’re all here to do the best work of our lives together, and have a lot of fun along the way.
We believe that real-time collaboration and human connection are necessary ingredients in building a high-velocity, creatively-oriented consumer product. We maintain core hours (10am - 3pm Pacific) where everyone is online, regardless of timezone. Over half of us are located near our hubs in SF and NYC, and folks outside of those cities travel to attend team offsites once-per-quarter.
The Role
We’re hiring for a Head of Data – someone with both the experience to make future-proof decisions, and the interest and ability to be deeply hands-on day-to-day. When we hit our trickiest problems, you’ll make the call about what to do and you’ll need to be right. Think “founder mode” for data (the substance, not the dogma).
The right candidate will immerse themselves in our business and product (monetization, engagement, retention, marketing) and connect dots across domains in order to scale a world-class learning experience. Your manager and our COO, Eli, will work hand-in-hand with you to ensure you hold the most valuable context and focus on the highest-impact areas.
Expect to be screen-sharing intra-day as you work through our thorniest problems with our data scientists Charlie, Rafa, and Colin. At any given time, we’re running close to a dozen experiments, and you’ll know what’s going on with all of them. You’ve likely spent a fair bit of time thinking deeply about “product data science/analytics”, which is where a disproportionate amount of our work lies.
You should also have spent time as a practitioner of data engineering in a modern data stack, and feel comfortable being a true partner and challenger for our data engineer, Graham. Some familiarity with machine learning is helpful, but you don’t need to be an expert – we avoid using magic wands when a simple sword will do.
We’re open to many profiles, but this may be an especially good fit for someone seeking a high-growth period in their early leadership journey (after making a big impact for years as an IC, probably at a startup). We’re looking for a lot in one person, but we know you’re out there!
Responsibilities
- Manage a small but mighty team
- Own all key decisions about how data works + is used
- Get hands-on (if you wouldn't thrive in a senior IC data role, this likely isn't a fit)
- Care deeply about the people around you, supporting and pushing them to do the best work of their lives
- Balance meeting the needs of the business today with solving problems in a way that ladders up to an ever-improving data ecosystem
Attributes:
- Work quickly and easily able to context-switch
- Strong digital consumer product instinct
- Excited about data-for-impact, not data-for-data’s sake
- Don’t miss the forest for the trees (e.g., accuracy vs. precision)
- High attention to detail
- Intuition for when to build right vs. ship quickly
Compensation and Benefits
We use a systematic compensation framework: salary scales are set each year for each job vertical, managers level folks on their team, and those levels are mapped directly to our compensation scales. A location-based adjustment is applied outside of SF and NYC (typically 5-10%) - feel free to ask us about your location!
Given the systematic approach, we always make First and Best offers - there is no negotiation (for new hires nor our existing teammates). This ensures people are paid based on their expected contribution, not their negotiation skills.
We offer top-notch health care plans, with 100% of the premiums covered for medical, dental, and vision for employees. About 1/3 of our team are parents, and we provide generous parental leave + up to $1900/mo in dependent healthcare coverage.
We offer flexible PTO, with a norm of taking off about 6 weeks per year (including federal holidays). We also provide home office equipment, a professional development stipend, and free food at our offices.
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