Senior Product Data Analyst, Special Projects

CarGurus

CarGurus

IT, Product, Data Science
Cambridge, MA, USA
Posted on Oct 18, 2023

Who we are
At CarGurus (NASDAQ: CARG), our mission is to give people the power to reach their destination. We started as a small team of developers determined to bring trust and transparency to car shopping. Since then, our history of innovation and go-to-market acceleration has driven industry-leading growth. In fact, we’re the largest and fastest-growing automotive marketplace, and we’ve been profitable for over 15 years.

What we do
The market is evolving, and we are too, moving the entire automotive journey online and guiding our customers through every step. That includes everything from the sale of an old car to the financing, purchase, and delivery of a new one. Today, tens of millions of consumers visit CarGurus.com each month, and ~30,000 dealerships use our products. But they're not the only ones who love CarGurus—our employees do, too. We have a people-first culture that fosters kindness, collaboration, and innovation, and empowers our Gurus with tools to fuel their career growth. Disrupting a trillion-dollar industry requires fresh and diverse perspectives. Come join us for the ride!

We are looking for a Senior Product Data Analyst to join our Special Projects team which tackles complex and unstructured projects that span across our numerous business verticals. You will frequently collaborate with various embedded product analytics teams to provide support and innovate for challenging builds and analyses.

Our Product Data Analytics org as a whole supports our Product and Engineering teams, providing the final word on all analytics for CarGurus’ user and dealer experiences. We are looking for thoughtful, curious, internally driven candidates who can dive into complex data and draw novel, insightful conclusions.

What you’ll tackle:

  • Exploration: Using your SQL expertise, conduct exploratory empirical analyses that bridge disparate data sources (e.g. website usage, subscription records, inventory volumes, etc.) to quantify product performance, user behavior, and/or market trends. Doing so will require distilling unstructured “big data” into actionable insights. Creatively compress sweeping, high-level exploratory requests into specific calculations that address your stakeholders’ underlying needs. Relentlessly dig into the data – consulting with other individuals and teams as you judge necessary – beyond the letter of the initial assignment, to hammer out any anomalies or self-direct your inquiry into other relevant issues. Be comfortable escalating and automating your analyses using R/Python scripting.
  • Experimentation: Be the authority on A/B experimentation, advising engineers and product managers on everything from the necessary data points to collect, required sample sizes, optimal metrics to examine, robustness of numerical findings, and the bottom-line success or failure of the tested changes. Provide technical guidance on and ideas for improving A/B testing-related tools, algorithms, and automated processes. Conduct self-directed research on the latest trends in A/B experimentation, and map out internal improvements based on your findings.
  • Advocacy: Advocate for specific, data-driven product innovations that help further high-level company strategy, primarily in partnership with the Product/Engineering teams. Participate in brainstorming and planning discussions across the organization to these ends. Avoid passivity in the face of flawed proposals; tactfully and persuasively push back against potential missteps.
  • Metrics: Craft the metrics that define business success, condensing abstract or loosely-defined concepts down to concrete calculations. Audit and improve existing metrics to better inform the business’ needs.
  • Visualizations: Build intuitive dashboards and other visual monitoring tools to guide daily decision-making by senior stakeholders and the company at large. Experiment with new kinds of visualizations that you believe could be better utilized in the organization. Re-work underlying code to appropriately structure visualization inputs.
  • Communication: Communicate and present complex quantitative findings in easily digestible terms to company leadership, homing in on key takeaways. Concretely and informatively respond to any probing, on-the-spot follow-up questions from senior decision-makers.
  • Architecture: Conceive of new data assets and build automated transformations (via DBT, LookML, etc.) to bring them to fruition. Partner with Data Engineering teams to advance core data modeling/architecture (e.g. user clickstream logging), by optimizing, integrating, and distilling large raw datasets and metadata. Draw upon prior experience with expansive, unrefined datasets to fix modeling bottlenecks in quick, scalable, outside-of-the-box ways.

Who you are:

  • Bachelors/Masters Degree with 4+ years (or PhD with 2+ years) of experience in an analytics or analytics-adjacent field, ideally involving complex data modeling, quantitative analysis, and applied statistics.
  • 2+ years of experience communicating the results of analyses to leadership teams to influence strategy
  • Expert fluency in SQL. Strong background with either R or Python is highly desirable.
  • Second-nature understanding of core statistical concepts (regression, significance testing, omitted variable bias, independence/dependence, etc.)
  • Knack for creative data visualizations.
  • Willingness to step outside your role and independently come up with novel ideas for the business.
  • Willingness to challenge others’ ideas and advocate for your own.
  • Excellent verbal and written communication skills. Very comfortable presenting high-impact and potentially sensitive findings to senior leadership.
  • Strong project planning skills, with experience building roadmaps, estimating required resources, and flagging inter-dependencies with other teams/projects.
  • Preferred tools/programs: Snowflake, Snowplow, DBT, Looker, Jira, Salesforce, Google/MS suite

Working at CarGurus
We reward our Gurus’ curiosity and passion with best-in-class benefits and compensation, including equity for all employees, both when they start and as they continue to grow with us. Our career development and corporate giving programs, as well as our employee resource groups (ERGs) and communities, help people build connections while making an impact in personally meaningful ways. A flexible hybrid model and robust time off policies encourage work-life balance and individual well-being. Thoughtful perks like daily free lunch, a new car discount, meditation and fitness apps, commuting cost coverage, and more help our people create space for what matters most in their personal and professional lives.

We welcome all
CarGurus strives to be a place to which people can bring the ultimate expression of themselves and their potential—starting with our hiring process. We do not discriminate based on race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex, marital status, ancestry, physical or mental disability, veteran status, gender identity, or sexual orientation. We foster an inclusive environment that values people for their skills, experiences, and unique perspectives. That’s why we hope you’ll apply even if you don’t check every box listed in the job description. We want to know what only you can bring to CarGurus.
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