Title: Data Operations Manager

Manager: Head of Business Operations

Summary: take ownership of delivering customers high quality data on time.

Our Mission: Arrakis builds data and software tools for sales and marketing teams that
sell healthcare products, to ensure the latest in healthcare innovation reaches the right
providers and patients faster.

The founder’s backgrounds: Previously Sam (CEO) co-founded a clinical testing lab
which raised $14M+ in VC led by top Venture Capitalists, out of which spun off a
COVID testing lab that did 36 million COVID tests. Sav (CTO) scaled an EdTech start-up
to $50M in Revenue as the CTO.

What you’ll do:

● Manage people. Hire and manage a team of data operations contractors.
● Manage data delivery projects. Gather requirements, create task lists, and
ensure tactical execution of delivering data to customers.
● Write SQL. Use SQL to perform data analysis.
● QA Data. Review the output of Machine Learning algos and the data team to
assess data quality.
● Create Data. Build high quality reference datasets through manual data
annotation and chat-gpt (no technical knowledge required)

What we offer you:

● Transparency, trust and integrity. We are honest, principled, and treat each
other with respect.
● Top of market salary and healthcare. We want to work with the best and pay
accordingly.
● Team retreats. Every 3-6 months we get our team together in person either in
Europe or North America.
● Work with AI. An opportunity to actually work with state of the art tools like
GPT-3.

What we're looking for:

● People Management. You rapidly produce production-ready code.
 ● Strong SQL skills. You can rapidly write complex SQL queries.
● Project Management. You love organizing chaos.
● Attention to detail. Extremely high orientation towards precise, high quality
work.
● Ownership. You like the idea of having an area of the business that only you
work on that you have full responsibility for the success of.
● A rapid learner. You’re curious and enjoy rapidly learning new skills.
● Easy to work with. You give and receive feedback easily and are trustworthy.
● Long term work until 1am PHT. Our CTO is in London and our customers and
CEO are in the US. We need someone who is comfortable working until 1am
PHT so that there is sufficient overlap with US hours.

The Arrakis Process

Our normal process.
● A 30m screening call with Rayhnuma (Head of Biz Ops).
○ Scheduled via Calendly.
○ Format:
■ We'll do a quick hello over video and then switch our video off and
be audio-only (as I've found it allows both sides to perform better
when not thinking about their video appearance).
■ In the first 10m or so I will answer your questions about the
company, role, me, or anything else you'd like to ask about.
■ In the second 20m or so I'll ask you a lot of questions. My goal is
to extract a large amount of information from you (inspired by the
10m Y Combinator interview). The most common reason that we
don't progress with candidates is because candidates are not able
to concisely answer my questions.
■ We’ll deep dive into the candidate’s background.
■ After this call I'll get back to you within 1 business day.
● A 90m deep-dive behavioral interview & live use case with Rayhnuma
○ Scheduled via Calendly.
○ I’ll dig into their project management, product management, people
management, and other relevant experience.
○ We’ll do a live data annotation and data ops process improvement
exercise.
○ After this call I'll get back to you within 1 business day.
 ● A 45m technical interview with Sav (CTO).
○ Scheduled via Calendly.
○ Format:
■ SQL questions.
■ Product / user empathy questions.
■ After this call we'll get back to you within 1 business day.
● A 60-90m interview with the broader team.
○ Scheduled via email.
○ Format:
■ Deep-dive into what the candidate has achieved in their different
roles.
■ After this call we'll get back to you within 1 business day.
● A take-home project (our normal process, can remove given norms).
○ We provide the candidate with a project with a 10h cap on the time limit.
○ The project is interesting and challenging, it’s not a little coding test.
● Reference calls.
○ I call 3 references.
○ How I normally run reference calls (I appreciate there are likely cultural
differences).
■ Ask the interviewer to stack rank the candidate versus all other
candidates they’ve worked with in a similar role, and explain why.
● If they equivocate, say they’re worked with lots of great
people etc, the candidate is not good.
● You’re looking for them to lean across the desk and shake
you and say you’d be an idiot not to hire this person.
■ Explain to the interviewer that everyone has strengths and
weaknesses, and that the perfect candidate doesn’t exist. Tell
them (politely) that the only answer that will absolutely disqualify
the candidate from being hired is that they don’t have any
weaknesses.

How we evaluate candidates

● We rate candidates at every stage of our process.
● We rate candidates on each part of our rubric (below), as well as a final score.
● We rate candidates from 1-4:
○ 4 - excellent (next action: progress them ASAP to the next stage)
○ 3 - good (next action: progress them to the next stage)
 ○ 2 - OK, but… (next action: remove candidate from the process)
○ 1 - bad (next action: we should retrospect on how they reached this step
of the process)

Rubric for this role

● Role-Specific:
○ SQL ➝ can they write SQL.
○ Project Management ➝ can they take a complex project and break it
down into discrete parts? Are they extremely organized?
○ Product Management → can they understand customer needs and think
critically about how best to solve those needs?
○ Data QA ➝ can they take a sample of poorly labeled data and label it
correctly?
○ People management (hiring) ➝ can they design and execute a hiring
process?
○ People management (performance management) ➝ can they improve
performance of workers and terminate when necessary?
● General:
○ Ownership ➝ do they want to be responsible for shipping great product
to customers.
○ Urgency ➝ a bias for quick action.
○ Drive ➝ a motivation for excellence.
○ Collaboration ➝ will work well with the team.
○ Integrity ➝ will they be honest, transparent, principled.

Questions we’d like you to ask candidates:

● How many people have you directly been responsible for: (a) hiring, (b)
managing, (c ) terminating, over the whole course of your career? (If numbers are
very high - estimates are fine.
● What’s a time that you created a process to make something organized that was
previously chaotic?
● Why do you like data operations?
● Why do you want to work at a startup over a large company?
● Why are you leaving your current role / what are you looking for next?