Data Lead

Wonderschool; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Direct access to CEO

In-person SF office

Job summary

Wonderschool is hiring a Data Lead to build the data foundation powering our commercial product, government platform, and AI coaching for providers at scale.

You will write SQL, ship models, load data, and debug pipelines daily. You’ll own a single trusted model of providers, children, and families, and deliver state‑mandated data work for government partners.

Qualifications

• Experience as the first or early data hire at a startup.
• Shipped data work in regulated environments (govtech/healthtech/fintech).
• Ability to define governance, masking, and audit trails as requirements.

Responsibilities

• Build canonical data model for providers, sites, children, and families across systems.
• Structure data for AI agents with entity tables and pre-computed briefings.
• Own data delivery for state government platform and data hub integrations.
• Lead identity resolution and deduplication across legacy state systems.
• Define and document business metrics and enable self-serve dashboards for teams.
• Monitor data quality, lineage, and governance in line with agreements.
• Automate workflows with AI agents and scale data questions across teams.

Skills

SQL

Entity resolution

Deduplication

Data governance

AI agents usage

Data modeling

Tools

dbt

BigQuery

HubSpot

Stripe

Claude Code

Hermes

OpenClaw

Job description

About Wonderschool

Wonderschool's mission is to ensure every child has access to early education that helps them realize their full potential. We do this by helping providers - small business owners who run child care programs - start, operate, and grow their businesses with powerful software, coaching, and support. We also partner with governments to modernize the public child care system, including building the technology platform for a state agency responsible for licensing, subsidy, and provider data statewide.

We are a Series B company backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Goldman Sachs, Long Journey Ventures, and First Round Capital.

The business is cash flow positive and expanding that position.

A core part of our strategy is using AI to automate how work gets done across the company.

Our agents already operate across product, engineering, operations, and go-to-market.

The bottleneck is no longer the agents. It is the data underneath them.

About The Role

We are hiring a Data Lead to build the data foundation the whole company runs on: our commercial product, our government platform, and the AI agents that coach and support providers at scale.

This is a deeply hands‑on role. You will write SQL, ship models, load data, and debug pipelines yourself every day. You will own two things that are really one problem: a single, trusted model of our providers, children, and families, and the delivery of state‑mandated data work (Data Hub integration, legacy migration, identity resolution) for our government partners.

You will use AI agents heavily to do this work. We run Claude Code, Hermes, and OpenClaw across the company, and we expect you to multiply your output with them. We stay small on purpose and hire only when the work demands it.

Get this right and every agent, dashboard, and coaching interaction gets smarter. This role reports directly to the CEO.

What You'll Do

• Build the canonical data model for providers, sites, children, and families across BigQuery, HubSpot, Stripe, and our product databases. One ID, one definition, one source of truth
• Structure our data so AI agents can read it and act on it: entity tables, snapshots, and pre-computed briefings that power provider coaching at scale
• Own data delivery for our state government platform: bi-directional Data Hub sync, historical licensing data migration, staging-to-prod loads, validation, and governance sign-off
• Lead identity resolution and deduplication across legacy state systems so every provider and child has one accurate record
• Define and document the metrics the business runs on, from "active provider" to churn risk, and make them self-serve for operations and provider success teams
• Set the data quality bar: monitoring, alerting, lineage, and handling of sensitive data in line with government agreements
• Use agents to automate your own workflows first, then help other teams do the same with their data questions

What Success Looks Like

• State data loads pass validation and acceptance without heroics
• Zero duplicate-provider incidents across our systems and the state's
• Anyone in the company can answer "how is this provider doing" in one query, and so can an agent
• Agents deliver accurate, personalized coaching to a pilot cohort of providers, validated by our provider success team
• Metrics stop being debated in meetings because definitions are documented and trusted

Who You Are

You have been the first or early data hire at a startup and you have also shipped data work in a regulated environment, govtech, healthtech, or fintech, where governance, masking, and audit trails are table stakes. You are as comfortable writing a dbt model as you are working through a data governance agreement with a state counterpart. You have real scar tissue from entity resolution and dedup work. You already use AI agents as a daily part of how you work, you understand what makes data legible to an LLM, and you figure things out independently. You are happiest as a team of one or two and would rather automate a task than hire around it. You want to build the system, not inherit one.

Location

• San Francisco, California - in-person, 5-6 days a week in our office in Rincon Hill

Why Join Us

• Founding data hire with direct access to the CEO and a mandate to build from zero
• Your work powers both a government platform serving a state's child care system and AI agents coaching thousands of small business owners
• Small, fast-moving team that values action over process
• Real data, real stakes: government agencies, child care providers, parents, and teachers all depend on what you build