6-8+ years in data science, analytics engineering, or a related role - you've been in the data trenches
Strong product sense - you've worked closely with product and business teams, you understand what drives user behavior, and you have good instincts for what to measure and what to build
Deep SQL expertise - you think in SQL, you've built data models, you know your way around a warehouse
Pipeline experience - you've built and maintained data pipelines, worked with dbt, dealt with data quality issues firsthand
Enough software engineering chops to be dangerous - you can build and ship a working tool in Python, not just a notebook. You can wrangle APIs, deploy a service, write code that other people can maintain. You're not a SWE, but you're not afraid of production
Genuinely excited about AI - you've been building with LLMs on your own time. You have opinions about which models are good at what. You've tried building agents, RAG systems, or AI-powered workflows. You follow the space obsessively because you think it's going to change everything - including how data teams work
Builder mentality - you see a manual process and you can't help but automate it. You ship fast and iterate
Autonomy - this is a new function. You'll define the roadmap as much as execute it
Experience with dbt (building and maintaining production models)
Snowflake administration and optimization
You've built Slack bots, internal CLI tools, or developer productivity tools that people actually used
Background in AI agent frameworks
Experience with BI tools - you know what's worth automating because you've done the manual version
A/B testing and experimentation - you've designed experiments and analyzed results
Early-stage startup experience