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 platform operates at very large scale, processing trillions of events annually in a petabyte-scale data lake and supporting thousands of data workflows and analytical queries that power decision-making across the company.

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 data projects 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 – this work spans both foundational data platform work like data warehouse architecture, metric governance, and semantic consistency across our entire data stack, as well as insights and modeling work that leverages the platform to deliver business value. In addition, you’ll work with stakeholders in other departments to understand our business needs, build highly reliable and accurate data pipelines that the company can trust, 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, Snowflake, SageMaker, AWS Glue, Mode, Omni, 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.
• Ongoing analytics engineering work to reliably and accurately model complex billing and subscription data, enabling it to be easily queried for business insights.
• Price sensitivity research and competitive market analyses

The role

Philo is seeking a Head of Data to lead and evolve 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 

• 15+ years of experience across analytics, data science, data engineering, or related data functions, with significant proven experience leading multidisciplinary data teams through ambiguity, in both a strategy and personnel management capacity. (Startup experience preferred.)
• 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 (Python preferred), 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 (or ability to adapt to this environment very quickly).
• Experience in consumer subscription, streaming, media, ad-supported products, or other event-rich digital businesses is preferred.
• 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. We empower our colleagues to do their best work while supporting one another in pursuing shared goals. We value pragmatism, pride in our work, and passion, with transparency and openness as fundamental parts of our culture.

We’re committed to diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility as we grow the Philo team and shape the future of TV. We believe that a diverse range of voices and perspectives enables us to innovate faster and create the best experiences for our subscribers. Philo is proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer. We’re committed to supporting every candidate and employee. If you need an accommodation at any stage of the process, please email [email protected] and we’ll work with you to meet your needs.

Philo offers 70+ top-rated networks, including AMC, BET, CMT, Comedy Central, Discovery Channel, Food Network, Hallmark Channel, HGTV, HISTORY, Investigation Discovery, Lifetime, MTV, Nickelodeon, OWN, VH1, We TV, and more. It also includes all the groundbreaking originals and blockbuster movies available with AMC+ and access to HBO Max Basic With Ads and discovery+. Our service also includes 100+ free channels and premium add-ons like STARZ and MGM+.

Our extensive library boasts over 85,000 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 City and Cambridge, MA. Our leadership team includes alums from HBO, Tubi, and Meraki, and is backed by NEA and industry partners like Warner Brothers Discovery, Paramount, 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, company stock options, and health benefits. Salary is determined by experience and location:

• San Francisco, New York City: $325K - $375K
• Boston, DC Metro, Los Angeles, Seattle: $305K - $355K
• Denver, Atlanta, Austin, Las Vegas, Sacramento, Chicago: $285K - $335K
• Texas, Florida: $270K - $320K

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.

Use of Automated Tools in Our Hiring Process

We use software tools, including our applicant tracking system (Ashby), to help manage applications for this role. Automated features (i) assess the skills, experience, and qualifications relevant to the role as described in this posting, and (ii) flag applications that appear fraudulent, duplicative, or not genuinely submitted by the applicant.

A summary of the most recent independent bias audit of the automated employment decision tool used in this process, including the audit date and data source, is available here: Bias Audit Summary.

You may request that a member of our team review a decision through a process that does not rely on the automated tools, or request a reasonable accommodation, by emailing [email protected]. We will not retaliate against you for exercising your rights.

Information about the type and source of the data our tools collect, our data retention policy, and how these tools were used in evaluating your application is described in our Privacy Notice – Employees,Applicants, Officers, Directors, and Contractors, or available by emailing [email protected].

Depending on your state of residence, you may have additional rights, including to an explanation of an adverse decision, correction of inaccurate data, and meaningful human review. To exercise these or ask whether they apply, email [email protected].