Senior Vice President, Data | Centro

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Description

ABOUT THE TEAM

Centro is building the world’s most respected engineering organization.  This is a bold claim, and one we do not make lightly. Of course, we can back it up: Ad Tech is one of the hottest technology sectors today, with some of the most distinguished engineering organizations vying to be the first to truly and forever disrupt a $600 Billion industry.

We are building a suite of SaaS applications that will automate and streamline digital media management - disrupting an industry often run by fax machine and spreadsheets. On our platform, our customers negotiate, analyze, and reconcile complex deals at blazing speed.  The ability to manage any type of digital advertising campaign across 100% of all digital channels drastically improves the productivity and performance of digital media teams - reducing costs and maximizing profitability.  

Centro is winning ad tech, and nothing garners respect like success. Will you join us?

ABOUT THE ROLE

This role will be responsible for organizing, leading and growing Centro’s Data Technology Group - this includes data science, data engineering and analytics. A key contributor to overall strategy and vision, you will also be responsible for realizing the vision by designing and building phenomenal, data-based, product components as part of Centro’s media platform.

You will use data modeling, machine learning, statistical methods and related techniques to leverage Centro’s priceless proprietary data plus other 1st and third party data sources. You will discover trends, build machine intelligence and predictive capabilities, optimize and enhance and bring insight to the point of action with compelling visualizations and embedded analytics.

Working with our senior business and technology leaders, you will drive the team to explore and discover the patterns that can inform media decisions and also explore unique business opportunities for Centro that enable us to leverage our collective data assets. The ideal person will have a blend of educational and business work experience and be capable of representing Centro at conferences, trade shows, and client meetings.

There is a small existing team with a broad range of backgrounds and experience that needs a strong, hands on leader to grow and scale, accelerating delivery on Centro’s vision. This team is part of the overall R&D group led by Centro’s CTO.

CORE RESPONSIBILITIES

• Contribute as a member of the R&D leadership team.
• Lead the development and testing of hypotheses
• Research and apply multidisciplinary techniques, findings and approaches
• Design, implement and analyze algorithms that substantially impact Centro products
• Lead development of prototypes and guide solutions into production
• Contribute to Centro’s product roadmap
• Serve as the primary person to consult on complex data science issues, contributing key ideas
• Grow and lead a strong data team of scientists, researchers, engineers and analysts to help you accomplish company goals
• Use predictive modeling, statistics, trend analysis, and other data analysis techniques to collect, explore and identify the right data to be analyzed from internal and external sources
• Construct software systems and algorithms to explain or predict behavior and solve a variety of business problems
• Serve as spokesperson and advocate on relevant data science issues to both internal and external audiences and stakeholders
• Perform data analysis and data mining for multiple business functions and areas
• Create ad-hoc analysis and interpretations
• Maintain data and in-house infrastructure
• Coordinate analytic processes and develop new models to increase efficiency and output
• Create new techniques and avenues for collection, interpretation, and analysis of multiple data streams business wide

QUALIFICATIONS

• 15+ years working with large datasets, applied statistical methods, machine learning and software systems.
• 5+ years at the VP+ level responsible for leading a similar group
• Knowledge of data mining and predictive analysis
• Experience dealing with scalability challenges
• Experience working with open-source tools, cloud computing, and data visualization
• Conceptual modeling experience– sharing and articulating theories
• Ability to communicate new knowledge and insights gained from analysis of big data
• Experience performing statistical analysis to quantify the limitations of models
• Ability to take the inferences from data and produce decisions from it that will optimize objectives
• Ability to transfer knowledge and concepts to the team that is implementing the actual system
• Ability to grasp data and see patterns or make inferences at a high level
• Experience growing and managing a mixed team of data scientists, engineers and analysts across geographies and being a hands-on leader.
• Obsession with data and system improvement, tempered with pragmatic ability to prioritize
• Proven research background, in academic or industrial work, with an emphasis on delivering practical research that has a critical impact on multiple projects
• Awareness of business objectives and ability to apply this understanding to recommend and implement product development for difficult and complex technical issues
• Ability to script experimental solutions and use off-the-shelf statistical analysis tools
• Ability to quickly prototype experimental solutions and develop robust, maintainable production systems
• Experience building systems at scale using open source components such as Hadoop, MapReduce, Pig, HBase, Mahout, etc.
• Experience with relational and nonrelational data stores such as MySQL, Postgres, Oracle, MongoDB, Cassandra, Neo4J
• Experience with API based integration over the Internet using XML, JSON, REST and classic ETL/data mapping and transformation products and process.
• Experience with statistical and mathematical packages such as R, Octave, Matlab, SAS, SPSS
• Experience with Linux or Unix based production environments.
• Proficient in a programing language such as C, Java, C++, Python.
• Strong results driven personality, with a high level of enthusiasm, energy and confidence
• Excellent analytical, communication, organizational and presentation skills
• Managerial skills: hire, train and mentor research team
• Ability to demonstrate flexibility and integrity: be able and willing to work hands on, independently or with a small team providing leadership
• Experience working at a growth-stage startup company
• Experience with large scale algorithm challenges in the consumer Internet space
• Experience data wrangling/etl.
• Interest or skill in data visualizations that answer questions succinctly
• Data modeling
• Interest or experience in collaborative filtering, clustering, regression analysis, machine learning, nlp, algorithms.
• Understanding of Business KPI's
• A/B testing.
• Intuition about data and data mash-ups
• Work well independently or in groups
• Not afraid to work complex/seemingly intractable problems
• Strong communication and collaboration skills
• Presence as a recognized, published thought leader in their prior industry
• Frequent speaker at industry conferences and events focused on data topics
• Applicants must be authorized to work in the U.S.
• Has experience with Data Privacy and Data Rights across legal jurisdictions.

PLUSES
Advertising/marketing/media experience

EDUCATION
Graduate degree (PhD preferred) in a quantitative field such as Computer Science, Mathematics, Statistics or applicable engineering or physical/life science subject areas. (Machine Learning/AI/Big Data focus from a well-regarded program preferred)

ABOUT CENTRO

We were founded in 2001, with our roots in local digital buying. We built our own media management system to aggregate small local sites market by market so that advertisers could effectively and quickly utilize the benefits of local digital media. We expanded to working with national sites in 2008 and rapidly grew to one of the largest buyers of digital media in the U.S. We bring the scale of a large media buying agency to our client partners. Today we manage $350MM in digital spending for our clients and we manage almost 6,000 campaigns which gives us incredible knowledge of the marketplace. 

Our vision is to deliver a unified, holistic platform to simplify digital media operations. Streamline and scale campaigns across any class of inventory, publisher or digital channel. Centro Media Manager will bring it all together under one powerful yet easy-to-use cloud-based application.

Centro is an Equal Opportunity Employer and does not discriminate against any employee or applicant on the basis of race, gender, age, disability or any other basis protected under the law.