About the Company

Joining the Leapfrog team means being part of one of Built in Chicago’s top 100 digital companies in Chicago, one that helps brands uncover new customers and revenue through leading and innovative digital marketing technology.

Leapfrog is a performance marketing agency that delivers new customers for our clients by connecting data. We’ve built a proprietary technology platform which captures data from each step of a consumer’s purchase journey and uses it to increase the likelihood of a valuable outcome for our clients. We use distributed systems to solve complex compute problems, develop data architectures to support machine learning, and predictive analytics to deliver optimal consumer experiences. We build high-volume data processing systems supporting some of the largest companies in the US in ways their internal teams, agencies and IT consultants simply cannot.

Our platform models and analyzes consumer data from digital advertising and device behavior, operational data from our own applications, call centers, the back-end systems of our clients, and performance data from our own proprietary sources. Then we feed all of that data into systems that advise the consumer-facing parts of our platform to deliver a purchase experience with the highest propensity to convert. The insights we deliver translate to real, meaningful value for clients trying to solve difficult problems in digital marketing.

About the Position

The Data Architect is a new position created to address a major expansion in the breadth and depth of Leapfrog’s data, and the set of predictive analytics applications it supports. Most importantly, the position is intended to dramatically augment the capacity of our technology platform to leverage that data to generate new and previously unseen types of insights and enable data-driven actions for our clients and our business. The role represents the opportunity to help guide the future of the data components of our marketing technology platform.

The position’s responsibility is to innovate and advance how data is stored, consumed, integrated and managed within our marketing technology platform. As a data architect, you'll work closely with and provide guidance and education to our Engineers, Database Administrators, Marketing Insights and Data Science professionals to build an efficient, scalable and durable architecture that manages our data assets for maximum availability to internal program teams and external clients.

This is an engineering leadership position, requiring equal parts architectural design, collaboration with engineering teams for cross-platform implementation, and hands-on development. You’ll have the opportunity to build the designs you envision and establish relationships with other team members who can help you execute your plans.  As with all of our team members, you’ll be afforded the opportunity to continuously learn, and to practice sharing that expertise with other team members in a variety of structured and informal teaching forums. 

About the Team

Leapfrog’s Technology team looks much more like a startup team than an IT team. We’re a 50-person team of people with Engineering and Product backgrounds. Our culture is a teaching hospital, so we hire people from a lot of different backgrounds and experiences. As a result, we tend to focus on building and developing talent as a means to build great software, which makes our clients very, very successful and grows our business. We’re an Open Source shop. We use Python, Ruby, and JavaScript; PostgreSQL, RabbitMQ and Redis; R, SciPy, Pandas and Jupyter Notebooks. We do use some commercial tools, though, like SQL*Server and Tableau. We’re pretty open-minded and pragmatic. We use Agile/Scrum to run our teams, but more importantly, we dedicate a lot of effort to team development—making sure teams have the resources and environment most conducive to their success.

Responsibilities

• Providing a Data Architecture Vision
  • Designing data architectures based on input from Technology leadership and from our business leadership as it relates to business strategy and goals. 
  • Championing the adoption of frameworks and data processing architectures that best suit our needs and future direction.
  • Championing the movement to emerging technology solutions when they best suit our needs and future direction.

• Executing on the Data Architecture Vision
  • Contributing on teams with multiple technical disciplines, but also working independently and designing components of the data platform.
  • Working with Product Managers to craft ideal technical solutions for our platform needs.
  • Helping Engineering leadership craft optimal solutions to complex data problems.
  • Building and maintaining high-volume data processing pipelines.
  • Crafting robust integrations into our clients’ platforms and third-party vendor services.
  • Integrating internally and externally generated data for the generation of statistical models and machine learning to help our platform deliver the right message to our client’s consumers in real time.

• Data Architecture Leadership
  • Collaborating closely with Systems and Software Engineers to ensure that applications and infrastructure operate in concert with our Data Platform.
  • Collaborating with Marketing Operations team members and external partners and contractors to gather performance analysis and new requirements based on patterns of usage.
  • Providing guidance and mentoring to junior team members.
  • Participating in pairing sessions, code reviews, lightning talks, and researching things independently.

Qualifications

• A minimum of eight years of experience in architecting data platforms and integrations, demonstrating successful design, build, rollout and ongoing delivery of consumer-facing business-critical applications starting from raw business requirements.
• Mastery of traditional data warehousing concepts, methodologies, tools and technology.
• Experience supplementing, augmenting or replacing traditional data warehousing implementations with emerging technologies.
• Experience setting the technical direction for architecting large-scale data platforms.
• Experience designing data marts for analytics and data science.
• Successful experience working in an Agile/Scrum environment.
• Experience with Microsoft SQL*Server.
• Experience with PostgreSQL or other Open Source relational databases.
• Experience with column-oriented data stores, in particular cloud-based solutions like Redshift and BigQuery.
• Experience with dynamic languages like C#, Python or Ruby for architecting transformations and integrations.
• Knowledge of pragmatic engineering practices like iterative releases, test-driven development, continuous integration, and the use of version control systems (Git and TFS).
• Experience with noSQL data stores (Redis) and asynchronous task processing.
• Experience with analytic and reporting tools (Tableau experience is especially useful).
• Familiarity with Hadoop and related projects.
• Experience with JSON data types a plus.
• Experience with digital marketing or advertising, and marketing data models (or models of equivalent complexity) a plus.
• Microservices architecture experience is a plus.

Perks

Leapfrog is a great place to work. We have competitive pay, a matching 401k package, life & disability insurance as well as bonus potential. We focus on education, training and inclusivity on our teams in our day-to-day work, and by encouraging and financially supporting our employees to attend relevant training and conferences. We have a casual environment and strive to maintain a work/life balance, including flexible work scheduling options and parental leave. In addition, Evanston is a great neighborhood with good food (Edzo's, Whole Foods, and 50+ other restaurants) and our office is steps away from the Dempster Purple Line and a short walk from the Davis Metra.

The real perk of this job is the ability to contribute to a profitable and growing company that strives to give employees the ability to master their craft, increase their skills and be autonomous in their work. We are a small enough company that you can witness and be rewarded for your contributions, but large enough to partner with Fortune 100 companies. We support an individual's contribution to the community at large with multiple philanthropic activities and encourage employees to be part of their larger working collective by attending and supporting prominent conferences.

What's Next

Please submit your resume and cover letter (we really like cover letters). Consider your background, what you know, what you want to learn in your career, and how you feel you fit this position. Links to a personal blog and/or github repository that would help represent the quality of your work are also greatly appreciated. If you want to know more about us and what we do, here is our tech blog: http://leapfrogonline.io.