Head of Data, Descript
$224-276k
Office located in Mission District, San Francisco
Collaborative audio and video editor
Open for applications
Collaborative audio and video editor
101-200 employees
Open for applications
$224-276k
Office located in Mission District, San Francisco
101-200 employees
Company mission
To make video a staple of every communicator's toolkit, alongside docs and slides.
Role
Who you are
- You have 10+ years of experience in data, including at least 5 years in leadership roles
- You excel at turning complex data into clear, actionable insights and can confidently advocate for strategic decisions
- You communicate effectively across executive, product, and go-to-market teams, ensuring alignment and impact
- You know when data should drive decisions and when qualitative factors or intuition should play a role
- You are passionate about nurturing a collaborative, inclusive, and high-performing culture that values curiosity, excellence, and continuous learning
- You have a proven track record of building and scaling data teams in high-growth tech companies
- You have hands-on experience across the data stack, from infrastructure to insights, with deep expertise in modern data architectures, cloud-based warehouses, ETL pipelines, and big data ecosystems
What the job involves
- In this role, you will lead a transformative journey, overseeing the entire data stack—from infrastructure to insights—to build a lasting data-driven culture and accelerate AI-first product development.
- As part of our leadership team, you will shape how we use data to unlock value, deepen customer insights, and drive innovation—balancing empirical evidence with strategic intuition.
- Your impact will extend across the organization, from advancing AI-first products to driving measurable business results
- Design an integrated data ecosystem: Build and maintain a data architecture that seamlessly collects, stores, and transforms raw data into meaningful insights
- Shape company strategy with data: Use data to identify opportunities, guide strategic decisions, and support long-term growth
- Champion data-driven decision-making: Promote the use of data in business and product decisions while recognizing the role of creativity and intuition
- Lead and develop a high-performing data team: Recruit, mentor, and support data engineers, analysts, and scientists, fostering a culture of growth, innovation, and ownership
- Collaborate across teams: Work closely with product, finance, marketing, and sales to ensure data-driven insights inform key decisions and drive impact
- Shape technical strategy: Align data infrastructure, tools, and processes with business goals to ensure scalability and efficiency
- Advance AI and machine learning efforts: Partner with AI teams to improve data quality, manage large-scale training datasets, and refine performance monitoring systems
Our take
Descript offers podcasters, YouTubers and other content creators a series of modern tools for editing and transcribing audio and video files. It stands out from more traditional editing platforms by using modern tools like natural language processing and AI generated transcriptions.
One of its most newsworthy features is its transcription to audio editing software. Users can edit the AI generated transcription in text format, which is then reflected in the audio itself, and in the speaker's “natural" voice. Founded by Groupon founder and former CEO Andrew Mason in 2017, the company has experienced fast growth, and has already been used across the industry by outlets like the BBC, NPR, VICE, The Washington Post and The New York Times.
The company’s early success and future potential have been underlined in the form of substantial funding. The podcasting industry alone (which encompasses both video and audio) accounted for $22 billion. Descript, which continues to add intelligent and quality-shifting features, is well-positioned to capture this lucrative and growing market.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
30% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 4 rounds)
Oct 2022
$50m
SERIES C
Jan 2021
$30m
SERIES B
Total funding: $100m
Company benefits
- Generous healthcare package
- Unlimited vacation time
- Catered lunches
- Whether you love WFH or can’t wait to get back to being in person, we're interested in offering an environment that works for you
Company HQ
Civic Center, San Francisco, CA
Leadership
Andrew Mason
(CEO)Studied at Northwestern University before founding Groupon in 2008. Was a Part-time Partner at Y Combinator and co-founder of Detour.com.
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