Director of Analytics - AdKnowledge (Kansas City, MO)

Company Overview:

Adknowledge is a performance-based advertising network that utilizes powerful predictive technology to connect advertisers with consumers across multiple channels, including email, search, messaging, domain, and social networks. Over 50,000 advertisers use the Adknowledge ad network to promote their offers.

Adknowledge has developed patent-pending technologies that use predictive analytics to study consumer response patterns and display the most relevant advertisement possible per impression. The technology enables Adknowledge to deliver search-like quality for advertisers through non-search mediums.

Adknowledge has grown rapidly through the acquisition of Cubics, Mediarun, Lookery, Adonomics and MIVA Media, which includes the brand names Findwhat.com and Espotting. Adknowledge has been recognized by Red Herring and also by AlwaysOn Media as a Top 100 Private Companies award winner.

Founded in 2004, Adknowledge is a privately-held company with more than 180 employees throughout the world. Headquartered in Kansas City, Adknowledge has domestic offices in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, New York, and international offices in the United Kingdom and Australia. In 2006, the company received $48 million in funding from Technology Crossover (TCV) whose portfolio includes C|Net, eHarmony, Fandango, Expedia.com, iVillage, and Netflix.

Department/Team Overview

Focus

Adknowledge provides technology and services to publishers that enable them to deliver highly-targeted advertisements to their users. Adknowledge anonymously tracks behaviors on over 400M unique users. The data analytics team is responsible for managing a 10TB+ data warehouse that aggregates behavior data across a number of Adknowledge business units. The team creates statistical models and algorithms to recommend the right category of offer to a consumer at the right time to maximize response and conversion rates. Techniques include collaborative filters, clustering, and other recommendation systems. Data includes behavioral, geographic, demographic and social graph data.

Products and Technology

The company has a strong technology infrastructure, consisting wholly of proprietary code developed for the following functions:

• An advanced behavioral-targeting system running billions of calculations per day using consumer behaviors to predict what type of ad is most likely to trigger a response.
• An online pay-per-click marketplace located at www.bidsystem.com where advertisers purchase ads from Adknowledge.
• A proprietary API known as AdStation, which allows publishers to insert targeted advertisements from Adknowledge into their unsold ad inventory.

• 20+ terabytes of data housed in an open source, distributed data warehouse as well as Oracle, MySQL, and Netezza;
• The promise of cloud computing delivered in reality: extensive use of Hadoop on AWS for production analytics.
• 2000+ servers in 6 data centers worldwide;
• 40+ software engineers;
• 4+ billion consumer impressions served daily;
• Linux technology stack, heavy in Java and LAMP;

Adknowlege’s Director of Analytics will be responsible for improving revenue by managing a team to apply statistical techniques to very large consumer data sets.

1. Team Development: Manage a team of approximately 5 statisticians and 3 engineers including attracting, developing, motivating, and retaining highly talented individuals.
2. Analytics: Gather business requirements from key stakeholders and turn them into actionable analytics projects. Prioritize, set deadlines and mentor a team of statisticians. Create predictive consumer models, analyze traffic patterns and quality and model a large advertiser marketplace.
3. Data Management and Warehousing: Work with very large data sets (10TB+) and architect a distributed data management architecture that can scale to handle rapid growth.
4. Engineering: Manage a team of engineers focused on turning statistical models into production ready deployments. Make key technology decisions and manage vendor relationships. Utilize cloud computing (e.g. AWS) and open source platforms (e.g. Hive, CloudBase) to achieve scalability and efficiency.
5. Project Management: Institute lightweight processes to manage projects and provide visibility to upper management on project status and prioritization.
   

• Articulate strategic technical objectives (quarterly, annual, long-term), and lead the group to achieve them.
• Interact with internal and external customers to ensure continuous customer satisfaction, modifying plans and processes when necessary to maintain reliability and performance.
• All other duties as assigned

The successful candidate will be an analytical, thoughtful and business-minded leader with at least:

• 3+ years of fundamental people management (hiring, coaching, firing).
• 3+ years of experience involved in revenue impacting analysis of very large data sets including data mining, statistical tests and/or simulations.
• Proven experience translating requirements into solutions.
• Strong familiarity with Linux/UNIX, SQL and R.
• Background in software engineering strongly preferred with experience developing in Java.
• Degree in computer science, mathematics or related field.

• Communication Skills: Be comfortable interfacing with senior management, understanding complex business requirements and presenting the pros and cons of various technologies and statistical techniques to nontechnical managers.
• Leader/Builder/Recruiter: Able to attract, motivate and build a disciplined and goal-focused team.
• Resourceful: figure-it-out-and-get-it-done mentality.
• Analytical: An intelligent decision maker.
• Fast Paced: Enjoy rapid change within a small, entrepreneurial, technology-driven culture
• Strategic Skills: Have a superior business intellect and understand what to pursue and what to defer within an opportunity-rich environment.

Compensation: Competitive six-figure base salary and equity participation.

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