- Job title
- Founding Data Lead
- Job location
- San Francisco, CA, US / Remote
- Job description
- ### About the role
The owner of **Pocket’s data foundation and decision-making systems end to end**. You make our data reliable, accessible, and actionable across **product, growth, marketing, sales, finance, and operations**.
Pocket has already reached **hundreds of thousands of customers** and is scaling toward millions. Our data spans customer acquisition, e-commerce, hardware, app usage, subscriptions, customer support, and international markets. Your job is to connect these sources into a **trusted system that helps us understand our customers and consistently make better decisions**.
You will build the core data infrastructure, define how Pocket measures the customer journey, and work directly with teams to turn analysis into clear recommendations. You should be equally comfortable **writing SQL, designing data models, investigating customer behavior, and explaining to founders what the company should do next**.
This is a **hands-on, founder-facing role** for someone who wants to build Pocket’s data function from the ground up—not simply maintain dashboards or respond to reporting requests.
### What you'll own
* **Pocket’s data strategy, architecture, and analytics foundation**
* A reliable **single source of truth** across Shopify, Amazon, advertising platforms, the Pocket app, device usage, subscriptions, customer support, and finance
* **Data pipelines, warehouse architecture, transformation models, documentation, monitoring, and data quality**
* Product instrumentation, event taxonomy, identity resolution, and customer lifecycle tracking
* Definitions and governance for **company-wide metrics and KPIs**
* Analysis of the complete customer journey: **acquisition, purchase, activation, engagement, subscription conversion, retention, churn, and referral**
* Customer cohort analysis, behavioral segmentation, and identification of Pocket’s highest-value users
* **CAC, LTV, payback period, contribution margin, attribution, incrementality, and marketing efficiency analysis**
* Product adoption, feature usage, retention, and experimentation measurement
* Executive dashboards and recurring reporting for founders and functional leaders
* **Proactive analysis and recommendations**—not just reporting what happened, but explaining why it happened and what Pocket should do next
* Self-serve analytics that enables teams to answer common questions without compromising data quality
* The long-term development of Pocket’s data function, including selecting tools and helping build the future data team
### What we're looking for
* **3+ years of experience** across data analytics, analytics engineering, data science, data engineering, or a similarly quantitative role
* Experience working in a **high-growth startup or technology company**
* Experience analyzing customer cohorts at the scale of **hundreds of thousands of users**, ideally while the company was growing toward millions
* **Advanced SQL skills and strong working knowledge of Python**
* Hands-on experience with modern data warehouses, transformation tools such as dbt, BI platforms, and product analytics tools
* Experience **building reliable data pipelines and models**—not only analyzing existing datasets
* Strong understanding of **cohort analysis, retention, funnels, segmentation, experimentation, CAC, LTV, and attribution**
* Experience supporting product, growth, marketing, sales, finance, and executive decision-making
* An **obsession with data accuracy, consistency, documentation, and reliability**
* The ability to turn ambiguous business questions into structured analyses and clear recommendations
* Strong product and commercial judgment—you understand that **the purpose of data is to improve decisions and outcomes**
* Clear communication skills and the ability to influence technical and non-technical stakeholders
* **High ownership, low ego, intellectual honesty**, and the ability to execute without constant direction
* Consumer technology, DTC, e-commerce, subscription, mobile app, or hardware experience is a strong plus
* Experience building a data function or operating as an early data hire is a strong plus
### What we offer
* The opportunity to **build Pocket’s data function from the ground up**
* Ownership of data across a rapidly scaling consumer hardware and software company
* **Direct access to founders** and significant influence on company and product strategy
* High autonomy and the ability to turn your insights directly into action
* Complex customer, product, subscription, marketing, and commercial datasets at meaningful scale
* The opportunity to build the systems Pocket will use as it grows from **hundreds of thousands to millions of customers**
* **Base salary of $150,000–$180,000**, depending on experience
* **Meaningful equity** through Pocket’s employee stock option plan
## About the interview
1. **Quick intro call (15 min)** — experience, motivation, compensation expectations, and location fit
2. **Data case study** based on a realistic Pocket business problem
3. **Technical interview** covering data architecture, SQL, analytics, and data reliability
4. **Cross-functional interview** with Product, Growth, or Engineering
5. **Interview with the founders**
6. Reference check
7. Offer
8. Onboarding
## About Pocket
Pocket is a **Y Combinator W26 company** building a premium hardware plus software product in the AI voice recorder space. We are obsessed with **quality and speed**. We are scaling very fast in the US and European markets and building a device experience that can become the **category leader**.
