Head of Data

Philo: a streaming service for TV and movie lovers

At Philo, we’re a group of technology and product people who set out to build the future of television, marrying the best in modern technology with the most compelling medium ever invented — in short, we’re building the TV experience that we’ve always wanted for ourselves. In practice this means leveraging cloud delivery, modern tech stacks, machine learning, and hand-crafted native app experiences on all of our platforms. We aim to deliver a rock solid experience on the streaming basics, while cooking up next generation multi-screen and multi-user playback.

Data at Philo

Data underpins everything we do at Philo: making informed business decisions; analyzing and improving the quality of our streaming experience; running product experiments to optimize our signup flows and improve user journeys; and making it effortless for our users to find the perfect thing to watch. Philo serves over a billion streams to its users every year, generating a wealth of data that we leverage at all levels of the organization. Philo’s data pipeline processes nearly 8 trillion events per year into our petabyte scale data lake, where we run over 30k ETL and BI queries every day to bring data-driven insights to our team.

On the Data team, we’re looking for people who are comfortable working on a variety of interesting engagement, content discoverability, experimentation, acquisition, and retention-related problems across our streaming service. You’ll be working closely with other data scientists, analysts, and engineers to build and deploy solutions directly for our service. In addition, you’ll work with stakeholders in other departments to understand our business needs and deliver business-focused data insights to help the entire team thrive.

We are passionate about problem-solving and providing data-informed insights for the entire company, using both cutting-edge techniques and proven practices in close collaboration with every department. To complete our work we build on modern open-source tools including dbt, GrowthBook, Robyn, Superset, and PyTorch as well as SaaS tools such as Segment, Redshift, SageMaker, AWS Glue, Mode, Avo, and BigEye.

Some of the recent projects our Data Science team members have worked on include:

• Building marketing mix models and multi-touch attribution models to optimize customer lifetime value and predict RoAS (Return on Ad Spend)
• Modeling to determine which early product behaviors predict conversion
• Running experiments to evaluate and improve our ML-based content recommendation/personalization system
• Building data models for analysis of lifecycle marketing communications impact
• Modeling to analyze the impact of Quality of Experience events (e.g. rebuffering) on customer engagement and other business metrics.
• Data infrastructure engineering work including data warehouse cluster upgrades, per-query infra cost optimization, implementation of Apache Iceberg data storage, and evaluating alternative data warehouse technologies.
• Price sensitivity research and competitive market analyses

The role

Philo is seeking a Head of Data to lead our growing team of Data Scientists, Data Engineers, and Data Analysts – an effective, collaborative and empathetic leader who will help scale the team to meet our evolving data needs. This leader will work with stakeholders across the company to ensure that every department at Philo has the reliable and accurate data required to deliver the data-driven insights we need in order to achieve and exceed our goals as a company. 

Responsibilities

• Own all things data at Philo: ensure that stakeholders at Philo have access to the timely and accurate data driven insights that they need to do their jobs.
• Oversee the core data science work executed in cross-functional teams to drive product goals, including product experiments and A/B tests, Growth & Acquisition modeling, and product insights, including customer journey analysis and measuring effectiveness of content search and recommendation systems.
• Own the quality and performance of the data platform at Philo, including platform architecture and instrumentation, data collection/processing/validation, data governance, and security and compliance.
• Ensure that we are collecting the right data and events, processing them in a scalable and modular way, and building a foundation of reliable data that teams across the company can build insights from.
• Collaborate closely with the engineering team and AI/ML engineers to support the development and delivery of Philo’s content recommendation system.
• Collaborate closely with data roles in our business and finance teams (business insights, business analysts and financial analysts) to help them build a deep understanding of the Philo business, customers, and content trends.
• Manage the data team: train, mentor and coach members of the data team, direct their work and support their career growth; identify the roles we need as we grow and hire fantastic people to fill those roles.

Qualifications 

• 10+ years of experience in a Data Science role, 7+ years leading teams of data scientists and data engineers.
• Proven experience in a role overseeing a data team, in both a strategy and personnel management capacity.
• Strong skills as a hands-on data scientist who can lead by example, including demonstrated understanding of data architecture, statistical modeling in either Python or R, A/B/n experimentation practices, SQL, and experience independently developing data driven insights. Demonstrated ability to train and coach team members in these skills.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills; you are a strong communicator who can explain complex trends, data findings and analytical methodology to broad audiences with varying technical backgrounds.
• A deep understanding of business priorities and the ability to partner with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Experience working in a fast-paced, high-growth startup environment is a plus.
• Experience with Machine Learning and Deep Learning is a strong plus.

More about Philo

At Philo, we’re a company that puts people first—both our subscribers and our team. Our philosophy is to empower our colleagues to do their best work while supporting each other in pursuing shared goals. We value pragmatism, pride in our work, and passion. Transparency and openness are fundamental to our company culture. We are committed to diversity and inclusion as we grow the Philo team and shape the future of TV. We believe that a diverse set of voices and perspectives on our team enables us to innovate faster and create the best experience for our subscribers.

Philo offers access to top-rated networks, including AMC, BET, CMT, Comedy Central, Discovery, Food Network, Hallmark, HGTV, History, Investigation Discovery, Lifetime, MTV, Nickelodeon, OWN, VH1, WE tv, and more, along with groundbreaking originals and blockbuster movies included with AMC+. Our service also includes 80+ free channels and premium add-ons like STARZ and MGM+.

Our extensive library boasts over 75,000 titles, and our unlimited DVR allows users to save their favorite shows and movies for up to a year, skipping ads for a seamless viewing experience. Stream on up to three devices simultaneously, whether on your phone, tablet, laptop, or TV using Roku, Apple TV, Fire TV, Samsung TV, Android TV, Vizio TV, or Chromecast.

Philo is headquartered in San Francisco, with offices in New York and Cambridge, MA. Our leadership team includes a co-founder of Facebook and alums from Meraki and HBO, backed by NEA and industry partners like Discovery, Viacom, AMC, and A&E.

Join us at Philo and be part of a team that's shaping the future of TV!

Status: Full-time
Location: San Francisco, CA or remote within the U.S.
Compensation: Includes annual salary between $240K - $300K depending on experience and location, company stock options and health benefits

We value a diverse and inclusive workplace and we welcome people of different backgrounds, experiences, skills, and perspectives. Philo is an equal opportunity employer. We believe that everyone does their best work when they are supported by each other and the company, and we offer a generous set of benefits to make sure the Philo team is happy and healthy. Here is a sampling of the benefits we offer our team:

• Full health, dental and vision coverage for you and your family
• 401(k) plan with employer contributions (we match 100% of deferrals up to 3% of pay and 50% of the next 2% of pay)
• Flexible working hours
• Up to 20 weeks of fully paid parental leave
• Unlimited paid time off for vacation and sick leave
• $2,000 annual vacation bonus (we pay you to take a two week vacation)
• $5,250 annually for professional development and educational assistance
• $1,250 annual home office + TV stipend during first year of employment ($250 annually thereafter)
• $500/month ($6,000/year) bonus for employees who commit to working at least 3 days per week in our offices, plus generous commuter benefits ($315/month towards transit, rideshare, bike rental, or parking at our HQ office in San Francisco)
• Free Gympass subscription — an all-in-one corporate benefit that gives employees the largest selection of gyms, studios, classes, training and wellness apps
• Dog-friendly office
• And much more!

For California Residents: Philo’s CCPA Notice at Collection – Employees, Applicants, Owners, Directors, Officers and Contractors

Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.