Head of Data

About the Company:

Octave is a modern behavioral health practice creating a new standard for care delivery that’s both high-quality and accessible. With in-person and virtual clinics in multiple states, the company offers evidence-based individual, couples, and family therapy, while pioneering relationships with payers to make care more affordable through insurance. By raising the bar on how care is delivered and how providers are supported, we are building a sustainable system that values equity, affordability, and effectiveness.

About the Role:

As Head of Data, you will own our end-to-end data function: analytics, data engineering, and data science. You will set the vision and roadmap for how we use data and AI/ML across the company, ensure our infrastructure is reliable and scalable, and lead the development of product- and business-facing AI applications. This role is both strategic and operational: you’ll partner with executives to shape company direction, while also ensuring your teams deliver reliable pipelines, actionable insights, and production-ready models. You’ll also be a team builder, responsible for developing current talent and hiring externally to close skill gaps in critical areas like advanced data science, ML engineering, and data governance.

Management Responsibilities:

• Develops, coordinates, and implements systems, policies, procedures, and productivity standards.
• Provide leadership and guidance to the team, ensuring the achievement of goals and objectives.
• Foster a positive and collaborative work environment.
• Oversee the planning, execution, and completion of projects and initiatives within the team.
• Establish and monitor operational processes and workflows to enhance efficiency and productivity.
• Streamline operational processes, enhance efficiency, and improve overall organizational performance.
• Implement best practices, monitor key performance indicators (KPIs), and develop strategies to achieve operational excellence.
• Ensures a safe, secure, and compliant work environment.
• Accomplishes staff results by communicating job expectations; planning, monitoring, and appraising job results.
• Build and manage a high-performing team, including hiring, training, and development.
• Provide leadership to the team, including setting goals, providing guidance, and ensuring the team's overall success.
• Set performance expectations and goals for team members. Conduct regular performance evaluations, provide feedback, and address performance issues.
• Identify skill gaps within the team and develop strategies for filling those gaps. Support employee development through training, mentoring, and coaching. Identify high-potential employees and create succession plans.

Responsibilities Include:

• Strategy Leadership
• Define and drive the company-wide data AI/ML vision, aligned with business and product strategy.
• Partner with executives across Product, Engineering, Growth, and Finance to ensure data informs key decisions and creates competitive advantage.
• Evangelize data culture — making data and AI central to how we operate and build.
• Data Infrastructure Governance
• Oversee pipelines, warehouse, and infrastructure for reliability, observability, and scale.
• Establish a single source of truth for KPIs and reporting.
• Implement governance for data quality, security, and compliance.
• Analytics Decision Intelligence
• Lead analytics team to deliver insights that drive product, growth, and operations.
• Scale self-serve analytics adoption while maintaining consistency and quality.
• Build frameworks for experimentation (A/B testing, causal inference).
• AI/ML Innovation
• Launch and scale high-impact AI/ML initiatives, from pilots to production.
• Build the foundation for ML operations: monitoring, retraining pipelines, feature store.
• Ensure responsible AI practices around bias, fairness, and explainability.
• Explore emerging AI capabilities (LLMs, generative AI) to keep us ahead of the curve.
• Team Building Talent Development
• Lead, mentor, and develop a growing team of analysts, engineers, and scientists.
• Identify gaps and hire externally for critical expertise (e.g., ML engineers, senior scientists).
• Define career ladders and growth paths to retain and motivate top talent.
• Build the company’s reputation as a top destination for data and AI talent.

Required Qualifications:

• 8+ years of experience in data analytics/data science, with 4+ years in a leadership role scaling teams and delivering cross-functional impact.
• Expertise with analytics reporting and data platforms Tableau, SQL, Adverity.
• Fluency in SQL and Python; experience with modern data stacks (e.g. BigQuery, dbt, Metabase, Mixpanel).
• Proven leadership experience overseeing multi-disciplinary data teams (engineering, analytics, science).
• Track record of hiring and scaling teams at high-growth startups or scale-ups.
• Experience shipping ML/AI solutions into production with measurable business impact.
• Strong technical background: modern data stacks (dbt, Snowflake, Airflow), programming (Python, SQL), ML/AI frameworks.
• Strategic thinker who can roll up sleeves when needed.
• Excellent communication skills and ability to ‘translate’ between the data and the business via layman’s terminology of complex analytical methods to deliver a clear story to influence your recommendations with data and insights.
• Established track record of building and leading high-performing data teams, fostering a culture of collaboration, accountability, and knowledge sharing; strong desire to lead and grow the team’s expertise and leadership skills.
• Self-motivated to work with diverse business scenarios, handle multiple priorities, and have a business consultancy mindset while being technically (data) savvy.
• Advanced modeling techniques, strategic analysis skills, and understanding of SaaS metrics.
• Proven ability to drive business intelligence initiatives across the full data stack, from automated pipelines (Fivetran, dbt, Coalesce) through warehouses (Snowflake, ClickHouse, Databricks) to visualization tools (Sigma, Power BI, Tableau, Hex); ensuring organizational data integrity and strategic insight generation.
• In-depth understanding of modern data governance, security, and compliance best practices, with the ability to balance data accessibility with data integrity for data-driven projects.

Octave's Company Values:

The below values drive our day-to-day operations.

• We’re human beings first. We operate with empathy and kindness – with our clients, with our collaborators, and with ourselves.
• People deserve better than status quo. We’re willing to tackle the intractable problems, no matter how big, because someone should. We ask big questions, we craft big solutions, and we challenge ourselves and others to make it happen.
• No bystanders. No stars. No tourists. Each person has been selected to be here, and with that comes a responsibility to bring your expertise, share your ideas, and help make this company better.
• Partnership paves the path ahead. We don’t operate in a silo, internally or externally. To transform the system, we believe in working with others to create something bigger, better, and stronger.
• Quality is crucial at scale. Quality is core to our business, and we refuse to sacrifice it as we grow.
• Progress is a process. In the pursuit of progress, we iterate, reflect, learn, adjust – and always leave things better than we found them.
• There are people behind every data point. We recognize that numbers tell only one part of the story, and we also do the work to understand impacts at the individual level.

Physical Requirements:

• Prolonged periods sitting at a desk and working on a computer.
• Must be able to frequently communicate with others through virtual meeting applications such as Zoom and Google Meet.
• Must be able to observe and communicate information on company provided laptop.
• Move up to 10 pounds on occasion.
• Must be eligible to work in the United States without sponsorship now or in the future.

Compensation:

Octave is committed to pay equity. To maintain our commitment to pay equity, Octave will follow Pay Transparency regulations on allopen job postings. Current Pay Transparency laws require companies to include a position's salary or hourly wage range (not including bonuses or equity-based compensation) in any internal or external job posting. This requirement extends to job postings published by a third party at an employer's request.

Octave will not discharge or in any other manner discriminate against employees or applicants because they have inquired about, discussed, or disclosed their own pay or the pay of another employee or applicant. However, employees who have access to the compensation information of other employees or applicants as a part of their essential job functions cannot disclose the pay of other employees or applicants to individuals who do not otherwise have access to compensation information, unless the disclosure is (a) in response to a formal complaint or charge, (b) in furtherance of an investigation, proceeding, hearing, or action, including an investigation conducted by the employer, or (c) consistent with Octave’s legal duty to furnish information.

Starting pay for qualified applicants will depend on a combination of job-related factors, which may include education, training, experience, location, business needs, or market demands. The expected salary range for this role is set forth below and this range may be modified in the future.

The salary range for zone 1 (all states, excluding those in zone 2 or zone 3, and D.C.) is $239,300 - $255,700.

The salary range for zone 2 (CO, HI, MD, RI) is $263,200 - $280,000.

The salary range for zone 3 (AK, CA, CT, MA, NJ, NY, WA) is $275,200 - $280,000.

All zones are eligible for equity in the form of stock options and an annual bonus.

Additionally, this position is eligible for the following benefits: company sponsored life insurance, disability and ADD plans. Voluntary benefits such as 401k retirement, medical, dental, vision, FSA, HSA, dependent care and commuter/parking options are also available. Octave offers generous Paid Time Off as well as paid parental leave benefits.

This job description is not designed to cover or contain a comprehensive listing of activities, duties or responsibilities that are required of the employee for this job. Duties, responsibilities and activities may change at any time with or without notice.