Experience at an early-stage startup or as a founding data hire
Built product analytics from scratch — instrumentation, event taxonomy, dashboards, self-serve reporting
Legal or HR domain experience
Experience with LLM evaluation and observability (tracing, scoring, drift detection)
Familiar with dbt, Airflow/Dagster, Spark, or similar orchestration and transformation tools
5+ years across data science, data engineering, and analytics — you do all three, not just one
Strong SQL and Python — complex queries, data modeling, scripting, analysis; this is your daily toolkit
Databricks or equivalent modern data platform experience (Snowflake, BigQuery)
LLM experience — fine-tuning, prompt engineering, embeddings, RAG, evaluation; not just API calls
Traditional ML depth — classification, regression, clustering, NLP, feature engineering; you pick the right tool for the problem
Product mindset — you filter signal from noise, understand user behavior, and connect analysis to product decisions
Pipeline engineering — you build reliable, scalable data pipelines, not notebooks that break in production
Clear communicator — you present findings to non-technical stakeholders with clarity and conviction