Product Data Specialist

Vinci; Palo Alto (CA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Vinci is building the future of engineering intelligence with an AI-native platform for physics-based design. We are hiring a founding Data Scientist to define the data foundations, answer strategic questions, and drive evidence-based product decisions across GTM, management, and engineering teams.

You will start by mapping how engineers use the product, then connect usage to accounts and contracts to guide expansion and risk assessment.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of applied product or behavioral analytics.
• Fluency in SQL and Python.
• Comfortable building dashboards in Grafana or similar.
• Experience building and operating data pipelines against production data.
• Instrumenting a product: events, shipping, privacy considerations.
• Ability to communicate findings to non-analysts with recommendations.

Responsibilities

• Define engagement metrics for a professional engineering tool and publish them.
• Pose and answer questions about feature adoption and friction to guide strategy.
• Support engineers in debugging workflows and scaling usage across customers.
• Link usage data to accounts and revenue to identify expansion or churn signals.
• Measure usefulness of model outputs within engineers' workflows.
• Build pipelines turning data into analysis-ready datasets while protecting confidentiality.

Skills

Applied analytics

SQL proficiency

Python proficiency

Data storytelling

Cross-functional collaboration

Tools

Grafana

Spark

dbt

Job description

About Vinci

Vinci is building the future of engineering intelligence.

We created the first AI-native computational platform built on Foundation Models for Physics. It lets engineering teams bring deterministic physical reasoning into every stage of semiconductor and electronics design. By combining AI, physics and high-performance computing, Vinci makes it possible to explore far more design alternatives, uncover insights that were previously out of reach, and optimize products in minutes instead of days.

Leading semiconductor and electronics companies already use Vinci to solve some of the world’s most computationally demanding engineering problems. As we grow, we’re building the team that will define the next generation of engineering infrastructure.

The role

Engineers at some of the most advanced hardware companies in the world use Vinci every day. We are looking for someone to help us make the best product possible for these hardware companies. You will do this by being the founding data scientist at Vinci, setting the foundations of Data Science at Vinci, using data to answer questions at all scales and scopes. The insights and answers you generate will drive what we build next, what we retire, and where the product experience needs work.

You will start by establishing how engineers use the product. From there, you will connect that behavior to accounts, contracts, and pipeline, so that usage tells us where an account is ready to expand, where it is at risk, and what a customer is trying to do that we do not yet support.

Your work will have several audiences. Go-to-market teams need to know what customers are trying to do and which accounts are ready to grow. Management needs to know what each feature is worth and what that means for product strategy. Engineers need to understand a workflow that is failing for a user, see how usage is scaling, and find where the product can be improved. Each of these groups brings its own questions and its own decisions. You bring the evidence that will drive decisions, and you bring the questions that nobody thought to ask. A dashboard that reports a number is the starting point for this role, not the output. The output is the explanation of why the number is what it is and what we should do about it.

What you’ll do

• Usage measurement and insights. Define what engagement means for a professional engineering tool, build the metrics that capture it, publish them where the teams that need them will see them, and keep them trustworthy as the product changes.

• Product insight. Pose and answer questions about feature adoption, workflow patterns, and friction that will inform product strategy and feature decisions. Partner with product management on the questions they bring, and originate your own.

• Engineering support. Help engineers identify and debug workflows that are failing, monitor how usage scales across customers and features, and surface where the product can be improved.

• Usage to business. Join application behavior with account and revenue data to find where usage predicts expansion, churn, or an unmet need, and turn that into recommendations the sales and product teams can act on.

• Model usefulness. Measure whether users find the model’s output useful in their workflow. The AI team owns how good the model is. You own whether users are getting value from it.

• Getting the data. Build and maintain the pipelines that turn source databases and unstructured data into analysis-ready data sets while protecting customer confidentiality. You can think about high-level analysis but also translate that into and build the pipelines needed to connect the databases, do the analysis and present results to executives.

The measure of the role is how often product and go-to-market decisions at Vinci are made with evidence that you produced, and how often that evidence changed a decision.

Is this you?

You are not satisfied when you have answered the question you were asked. You want to know why the answer is what it is, and you keep going until you do. When a metric moves, your first instinct is to find the cause, not to annotate the chart. You have a record of analyses that changed what a team built or how a company sold, and you can explain how the finding got from your notebook into the decision.

You drive the insight from start to finish. Sometimes the work is analysis. Sometimes it is building the pipeline, constructing a data set from unstructured logs, selecting the right tool for a processing job, or writing the instrumentation code yourself. You treat all of that as part of the job rather than a prerequisite someone else handles, and you have the judgment to pick an approach that fits the problem and the team.

You are comfortable with a product whose users are expert engineers doing specialized work. Engagement here does not look like a consumer funnel, and you are interested in figuring out what it does look like.

What we’re looking for

• 8+ years of applied product or behavioral analytics, with specific examples of analyses that changed a product or business decision

• Fluency in SQL and Python

• Comfortable building and maintaining dashboards in a reporting platform such as Grafana

• Experience building and operating your own data pipelines, working directly against production databases and raw logs, using tools you selected for the job (Spark, dbt, or similar)

• Experience instrumenting a product: defining events, working with engineers to ship them or shipping them yourself, and catching the cases where the logged data misrepresented the behavior, all while protecting user privacy and confidentiality.

• The ability to communicate findings to non-analysts, in writing and in conversation, with a recommendation attached

Strongly preferred:

• Experience with technical or B2B products where the user is a professional doing expert work

• Exposure to simulation, CAD, EDA, or other engineering software

• Experience joining product usage data with CRM or revenue data