VP, Data and Engineering

The Smule mission is to connect people all over the world through the joy of making music at massive social scale. Music is much more than just listening… It's about creating, sharing, discovering, participating, and connecting with people. It is a social network with the power to break down barriers, touch souls, and bring people together from all over the world.

Smule today has 40 million monthly active users and is still growing at a fast pace. We’re looking for a seasoned data and engineering leader who can work directly with our California (SF, LA) based data engineering and audio/video teams to lead and develop further our engineering vision for the overall data flows, processing as well as execute our global vision. This leader will report to the Company CTO.

The Ideal Candidate

• Has a track record of building and maintaining teams and products involving complex data systems. 
• Deep understanding of the complexities involved in serving audio and video content as well as to put in place a data warehouse to manage a constant stream of a very large and dynamic dataset and events.
• Possesses strong decision making and prioritization skills. 
• Has been battle-tested in a high-intensity start-up environment. 
• Has led the data engineering team through the transformation from in-house data lakes to cloud-based solutions.
• Has broad experience working well across geographies.
• Is passionate about music and data engineering.

Role / Responsibilities

• Define and lead the strategy for the Smule data engineering group as well as oversee audio and video engineering groups including research around audio and video. Those are heavily interconnected and having the 360 perspectives of data flow is mandatory.
• Provide roadmap, delivery timeline as well as a strategy for the evolution of the technology and the system performance while ensuring an appropriate roadmap execution.
• Lead and manage a 10+ people team. 
• In partnership with the Operations team, help plan and maintain the data technical infrastructure, its configuration, performance, and storage requirements, with consideration of tiered data and data archiving
• Manage budget, usage, interpretation, and automation of data to various business partners

Requirements 

• 5+ years of experience in people and engineering management as a Director or VP of Engineering with a minimum of 15 people organization and a minimum of ten years of software/data engineering experience.
• Strong executive leadership experience leading teams of data engineers as well as core engineers (C++, Python, Java).
• Very strong people management skills 
• Excellent oral and written communication and interpersonal skills with demonstrated ability to work effectively with business and technical people.
• Experience engaging with top executives and collaborating with business leaders to leverage the value of data to drive and influence the business.
• Set clear expectations and vision for the engineering organization, setting and tracking goals and by soliciting, synthesizing, and delivering feedback to team members.
• Work closely with product teams to drive and decide team resources and allocation.
• Shown success driving teams and delivering results quickly in a startup environment.
• Working knowledge of SnowFlake, Kafka, Redis, Vertica, Grafana.
• Experience in consumer internet space, gaming with a very large scale of data (>10PB).
• Strong understanding of SQL and working knowledge of using SQL for various reporting and transformation needs.
• Thrives in a fast pace and direct environment.

Preferred

• MS in Computer Science and/or Data,
• DSP and Audio knowledge
• Some RDBMS knowledge OLTP and/or analytic columnar RDBMS including data modeling concepts (3NF vs Dimensional modeling).
• Experience working with an MPP system or Map Reduce.
• Experience with machine learning/recommendation algorithms