Data Science & Analytics

PlanetScale is growing rapidly and reinventing the transactional database market. The PlanetScale platform offers both Postgres and Vitess clusters. Vitess, an open-source database clustering system for horizontal scaling of MySQL, enables businesses to efficiently handle large-scale data workloads — without sacrificing developer experience.

PlanetScale is backed with over $100M in venture financing from top-tier VCs including a16z, Kleiner Perkins, SignalFire, and Insight Venture Partners. And we serve some of the most innovative companies in the world such as Block, Anysphere (Cursor), MyFitnessPal, Etsy, Kick, and thousands more. Our customers entrust us with what is often their most precious digital asset, their data, so the stakes couldn't be higher. We're looking for a leader to build and lead PlanetScale’s Data Science function to support best in class analytics, forecasting, and decision-making.

What's the job to be done?

Build and be responsible for PlanetScale’s data and analytics efforts from zero to one, and play a leading role in shaping decision making through data. You will be the key lynchpin connecting the business with data to inform how we are executing against our company goals and where to direct our resources. Your scope will be broad and cover at least the following:

• GTM Analytics: Partner with Marketing, Sales, and Customer Engineering to deliver pipeline, conversion, and ROI analytics; build forecasting for new business and retention, attribution, CAC/payback reporting.
• Product Analytics: Drive analysis of feature adoption, engagement, and retention indicators. Paint a picture of our customers’ health in general and across key areas of the product. Take ownership for implementing experimentation and testing to understand the success or failures of growth and product efforts.
• Analytics Engineering: Own our data warehouse and metric layer using your tools of choice.

What you will need

• Fluency in SQL and analytical modeling: Expert at pulling, joining, and transforming data from complex schemas; able to define and maintain core business metrics (ARR, retention, funnel conversion) with precision.
• Hands-on experience building dashboards and analyses: Comfortable creating KPI dashboards in modern data analysis tools and running ad-hoc SQL analyses to drive product and business decisions.
• Proficiency with dbt or modern transformation frameworks: Capable of designing modular, testable models and documenting data logic for reusability.
• Analytical and statistical breadth: Skilled in experimentation (A/B testing, lift measurement), cohort and retention analysis, forecasting (Prophet, ARIMA), predictive modeling (e.g., lead scoring, churn prediction), and casual models.
• Python: Confident using Python notebooks for analysis, data cleaning, and lightweight modeling; familiarity with pandas, scikit-learn, or equivalent libraries.
• Working knowledge of data pipelines and orchestration: Can contribute to or extend ETL/ELT jobs in Airflow or Dagster; understands ingestion from SaaS and event sources.
• Bias for action and autonomy: Operates comfortably in a startup environment, prioritizing impact over perfection.
• Ability to collaborate across all functions: Excellent communication with everyone from execs to engineers; covering everything from schema design to collaborating on KPIs, experiments, and insights.
• Awareness of warehouse performance and governance (nice to have) — Familiar with optimizing BigQuery or Snowflake queries, managing spend, and monitoring data quality and lineage

Why PlanetScale

PlanetScale is a profitable company with a philosophy centered around building small teams of p99 individuals and is recognized as one of the fastest growing companies in America.

At PlanetScale we believe in supporting people to do their best work and thrive no matter the location. Our mission is to build a diverse, equitable, and inclusive company. We strive to build an inclusive environment where all people feel that they are equally respected and valued, whether they are a candidate or an employee. We welcome applicants of any educational background, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity, age, citizenship, socioeconomic status, disability, pregnancy status, and veteran status.

If you have a disability, please let us know if there's any way we can make the interview process better for you; we're happy to accommodate!