Founding Data Lead

Pocket; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Direct access to founders

Equity

Autonomy

Job summary

Pocket is seeking a data-focused leader to own the data foundation and analytics across the company, from acquisition to retention. You will build the core data infrastructure, define how we measure the customer journey, and enable self-serve analytics for product, marketing, and finance.

You’ll work directly with founders, have high autonomy, and translate complex questions into actionable recommendations that move our business forward as we scale toward millions of customers.

Qualifications

• 3+ years in data analytics, analytics engineering, data science, or similar.
• Experience in a high-growth startup or tech company.
• Experience analyzing cohorts at large scale (hundreds of thousands of users).
• Advanced SQL and Python skills; familiarity with data warehouses and dbt.

Responsibilities

• Own data strategy, architecture, and analytics foundation.
• Build pipelines, warehouse architecture, and data quality monitoring.
• Instrument products, define event taxonomy, and track customer lifecycle.
• Deliver executive dashboards and proactive analyses with clear recommendations.
• Enable self-serve analytics across product, growth, marketing, and finance.
• Lead long-term data function development and tooling decisions.

Skills

Advanced SQL

Python

dbt

Data warehousing

Analytics engineering

Tools

dbt

BI platforms

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.