At Sprout Social, we build software used by more than 20,000 companies to create stronger relationships with their customers and create the world’s most beloved brands. As a SaaS product used 24/7/365 by organizations of all sizes, sectors, and geographies, we consume and generate vast amounts of data which hold great potential to improve our business and products. We’re looking for someone to lead and advance our data program, ensuring we mine it for all of its value.

Relying on your experience of building teams who turn data into business insight and action, you will influence and lead the next phase of growth and results for our data program and team. You will help us to focus among our huge corpus, and to prioritize opportunities among our rapidly expanding company. You will also contribute at a leadership level, partnering with product, engineering, and business stakeholders to identify, prioritize, and get buy-in for valuable data opportunities.

Through your creativity and leadership, you will catalyze accelerated business growth. Together with your team, you will leverage data to add customer value, improve our products, retain customers, increase revenue, and to continue driving compounded results with each incremental customer.

We’re looking for a collaborative, hands-on, highly motivating leader to help our data team succeed. If you can confidently lead a team to solve hard problems, and push them to learn from and teach each other, we'd love to talk with you!

The Experience:

• 3+ years leading teams of data scientists, data analysts, or data engineers, with a strong understanding of these roles.
• 5+ years as a data scientist, or comparable role, building data-driven products, and performing advanced analysis of structured and unstructured data.
• Expertise in the industry methods of data science including statistics, mathematics, programming, machine learning, and experimentation.
• Expertise with SQL, and Python or R.

Within 1 month, you will:

• Complete Sprout’s New Hire training program alongside other new Sprout team members.
• Meet and begin to build relationships the data team, your core stakeholders, and leadership.
• Become familiar with the data team at present, including the team’s current and upcoming work, existing processes, and the systems and products that the data team owns.
• Begin to understand our business, product, customers, and market.
• Learn Sprout's management practices and tools.

Within 3 months, you will:

• Partner with product and business stakeholders to understand their roadmaps and initiatives.
• Set the next one to two quarters of roadmaps for the data team. Lead execution and successful delivery.
• Meet with direct reports regularly to provide them with support and immediate feedback.
• Provide your team with support, guidance and actionable feedback on their work, and their longer term career growth.
• Consider improvements to our career bands.
• Dive into code and systems, contributing as needed. Observe and participate in code reviews. Coach on code implementations, analysis or model work, and data science/analytics practices.
• Begin to formulate a vision for the future of the data program at Sprout. Gather input from the team and all stakeholders on what’s working well, what their needs are, and how the team might best align to the current and future business.
• Begin to learn about the future direction of the business.

Within 6 months, you will:

• Lead your team as they ship new data products, features, and analysis to internal and external customers.
• Bring your data team vision to reality. Collaboratively develop, socialize, gain buy-in, and rollout the plan. Iterate and refine.
• Lead your team’s execution per your vision. Work with Product leadership to ensure Data Scientists are focused on the most important product improvements and feature development. Work with business stakeholders to ensure Business Intelligence is empowering and supporting their work.
• Invest and grow our BI team by hiring another Data Analyst and a Data Engineer.
• Complete a cycle of career band and performance review evaluations for your direct reports. Collaborate on their career growth plans.
• Participate in our Engineering Leadership group, sharing learnings, gleaning insights from peer Directors, and generally helping evolve Engineering at Sprout.

Within 12 months, you will:

• Build a tight integration between your team and the product and business lifecycles.
• Create a structure to support the organization’s business intelligence needs through a central, prioritized, organized, predictable development and analysis process.
• Lead your team to empower product and business stakeholders with self-service access to most of their business intelligence needs, though accurate, trusted data and metrics centrally accessible in Tableau.
• Create leverage for your team by leveling up the data and analysis skills of others throughout the company.
• Enable the data scientists to continuously perform analysis and experiments to improve our products and our trial customer conversion metrics.
• Surprise us! Use your unique skills, abilities, and insights to change your team, our product, and our company in material ways we haven’t imagined.

Of course, what is outlined above is the ideal timeline, but things may shift based on business needs and other projects and tasks could be added at the discretion of your manager. 

Note: When applying, please share work samples, projects, or publications.

About Sprout Social
Sprout Social powers open communication between individuals, brands and communities through elegant, sophisticated software. We are relentless about solving hard problems for our customers and committed to both customer and team success.

Team Sprout is a group of very talented, smart and passionate people with broad interests and backgrounds. We believe that true employee engagement cannot happen if you can’t bring your whole self to work, so we’re committed to building a diverse team, embracing an inclusive culture and investing in equity across our organization. That dedication is core to Sprout. We want all candidates, particularly those coming from traditionally underrepresented groups in the technology industry, to know they are welcome at Sprout.

We’re proud to regularly be recognized for software, product and company culture achievements. Our team’s shared belief in Sprout’s mission promotes a culture of openness, empowerment and fun. We have built a benefits program to match the strength of our team. This program includes:

• Insurance and benefit options that are built for both individuals and families, including generous company contributions
• Progressive benefit programs, like our parental leave program and free Divvy bike memberships
• High-quality and well-maintained equipment - your computer will never prevent you from doing your best
• Beautiful, convenient and state-of-the-art offices in Chicago’s Loop
• Solid programs in some of the staples: transportation, disability and life insurance
• Wellness initiatives to ensure both health and financial well-being of our team
• Breakfast and lunch options onsite, and more healthy snack options and beverages than you can imagine
• Growing corporate social responsibility program that is driven by the involvement and passion of our team members