Director – Data & Analytics

Risepoint assists primarily regional universities in increasing their access and impact by making their academic programs available to students online. Founded in 2007, Risepoint's mission is to expand access to high-quality, affordable, and workforce-relevant education, especially for working and adult students. Risepoint brings single-minded dedication to student success, an integrated set of services, and data-driven performance to our collaboration with university partners.

Reporting to VP of Marketing Analytics, we are seeking a strategic, collaborative, and technically skilled Director, Data & Analytics to lead and grow our Advanced Analytics team. In this role, you will shape the team’s vision, foster an inclusive and high-performing culture, and drive impactful machine learning and advanced analytics initiatives across the organization.

You will collaborate with marketing, strategy, operations, technology, other analytics and leadership teams to enable data-driven-decisions using machine learning and advance analytics methods.

Key Responsibilities:

• Strategic Thinking: Define and lead the data science vision, strategy, and roadmap in alignment with business goals and measurable outcomes.
• Team Management: Build, mentor, and lead a high-performing, collaborative team of data scientists.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner closely with Sales, Product, Marketing, Customer Success, Technology, Finance, and other teams to drive impactful data science initiatives.
• Analytical & Communication Excellence: Translate complex, ambiguous problems into structured, actionable analytical solutions. Present findings and strategic recommendations to senior and executive stakeholders to influence high-level decisions.
• Model Development & Operations: Oversee the full lifecycle of machine learning models, including development, validation, deployment, monitoring, and continuous improvement
• Enterprise Data Model: Collaborate with Data Engineering to design scalable, well-defined data assets, features, and metrics that support evolving analytical and product needs
• Standards & Best Practices: Establish and promote best practices in experimentation, modeling, data governance, and model reproducibility. Ensure robust documentation, version control, and transparency across all projects to support sustainability and auditability

What You’ll Need for Success

Education:

A bachelor’s degree in computer sciences, Engineering, or similar quantitative field. Masters in a quantitative field in preferred.

Required Skills & Experience

• 8+ years in data science, advanced analytics, or machine learning roles. With 2+ Years of experience in technical leadership capacity.
• Proven experience deploying machine learning models at scale in production environments.
• Strong programming skills in Python and experience with ML frameworks (e.g., scikit-learn, TensorFlow, PyTorch).
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills.
• Experience with modern data stacks: cloud data warehouses e.g. Snowflake, (DataBricks preferred), dbt cloud, MLOps.
• Experience with NLP, recommendation systems, causal inference, and/or time-series forecasting.
• Experience managing and growing technical talent.
• Strong communication skills and ability to influence across data, product, engineering, and business teams

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