Consultant (Data Specialist)

Description

AVP is looking for talented, diverse, energetic, and creative folks to join our fantastic team of consultants, and right now we are hoping to find a data specialist.

At AVP, we partner with amazing organizations to help maximize the value of their data and information assets. We untangle complex data management challenges and enable organizations to protect, manage, and leverage their assets through our consulting services, software products, and custom software development services. We holistically straddle human, business, and technology aspects of each challenge, apply proven and rigorous approaches, and collaboratively partner with customers to innovate and overcome. We love solving big, complex, difficult problems that have a huge positive impact on people and organizations. Take a look at our portfolio and you’ll see what we mean. Recent and upcoming projects include building experimental machine learning and crowdsourcing workflows for Library of Congress Labs Humans in the Loop, aggregating public datasets and creating a data access portal for Save the Black Press with Black Voice News, History Pin with Shift Collective, and researching researching open A/V streaming media and annotation protocols AudiAnnotate Audiovisual Extensible Workflow (AWE) project with University of Texas.

We are deeply committed to creating a more equitable and inclusive world. We pursue our values through our work, ensuring that accurate and authentic data is available and used to create breakthrough solutions and solve knotty problems. We also stand firmly committed against systemic racism and all other forms of oppression; and hold ourselves accountable for taking actions that reflect our values. With these values firmly in place, we invite potential team members who share our commitments and reflect a diverse array of lived perspectives and experiences.

We are seeking a data management consultant who can help bridge our consulting and software development services and products. This role will work on a diverse set of projects and challenges, including data migrations, system integrations, web and desktop application development, and data warehousing development. The one thing that is common to all of them: a lot of data.

Read more below and apply!

What you’ll do

As a consultant with AVP, each day will be different, but rewarding.

• You will work with incredibly diverse organizations, from media and entertainment companies to financial organizations, hospitals to university libraries, tech companies to governments
• You will work closely with our software development team as a subject matter expert (SME), data analyst, or project manager
• You will work closely closely with clients to identify needs and scope projects that meet the organization’s most pressing data management challenges
• You will formulate, test, and refine solution hypotheses
• You will gather a ton of information. You will interview stakeholders and users. You’ll craft and facilitate workshops. You will listen, observe, read, and probably spend a lot of time digging into datasets.
• You will spend a lot of time working with data — understanding and analyzing data sources, modeling data, mapping data, transforming data, normalizing data, and more
• You will help oversee software development projects by acting as a scrum master and project manager
• You will translate user and stakeholder requirements into easily understood and manageable documentation for developers
• You will always be looking for ways that we can improve, sharing your suggestions with the team, training and mentoring others, and creating internal documentation

A little about you

• You are a strong collaborator and an independent thinker
• You bring diverse identities and experiences. You are culturally competent.
• You are curious, always eager to dig a little deeper to figure out the why and how
• You are analytical and creative. You see connections between seemingly unconnected things
• You have experience working with structured and unstructured datasets
• You have experience writing SQL queries
• You are not necessarily a software developer, but can do some scripting in Python (or other languages)
• You can translate between users and technologists and create documentation that is useful to both
• You are always learning and improving
• You really care about the details
• You have real world Agile/Scrum and/or project management experience
• You have some knowledge of (or are interested in learning about) the domains of library/information science, product management, UX design and research, and/or business analysis

Bonus points

Optionally, you may have expertise in one or more of these areas:

• You may have experience building relational databases
• You may have some data science, statistics, and/or data visualization experience
• You may have some experience with NoSQL technologies
• You may have experience with (or are interested in learning more about) machine learning and artificial intelligence

If you don’t have one of those four more specific skills, but feel you would be a good fit based on the description above, we still want to hear from you!

--What we offer--

We work really hard to make working at AVP an amazing experience. We have a team full of truly exceptional people—the kind you’ll be excited to work with. Here’s how we operate:

Live Where You Want

We’re a distributed team, so you can live and work wherever you want. In late 2020, most people are used to working remotely, but we’ve been doing it for years, and will continue to once the world opens back up. We do have offices in Brooklyn, and Madison, WI—if you live in one of those areas, our crews there would love to have you. The rest of us are scattered around.

Work/Life Balance

We work hard and smart, but we’re in this for the long haul, no need to go crazy on the hours. We strive to make your workload manageable.

Take Vacation

We want you to take vacation. It’s important to get out and do something. We’ll look forward to seeing pictures of your vacation on Slack and hearing about your adventures at the weekly standup after you return. Even if you just need a break to sit on the couch for a week (we all know this feeling these days).

AVP Retreats

We get the whole team together two times a year to catch up, hang out, and plan for the future. In normal times, we’ll go to places like the mountains of Wyoming, the coastline of Florida (in the winter), and the cheese curds of Madison (at all times of year). We take advantage of working together, have strategy and planning sessions, bring in guest speakers and coaches, and do really fun things. The highlight is always hanging out together and having a blast.

Up Your Game

We’re serious about helping you improve your craft. We’ll support your attendance at conferences, online courses, and workshops, buy books and subscriptions. We have a culture of continuous improvement and we love to see our people growing (and teaching us what they learn!).

Benefits

You’ll be a W2 employee with benefits including medical, dental, vision, HSA, FSA, 401k, profit sharing, and more. AVP pays 80% of medical and dental insurance, and 100% of vision insurance. We also contribute 3% to your 401k whether you choose to throw any money in there or not. It vests immediately.

Be Yourself

At AVP we are committed to growing a representative team offering diverse perspectives from different age groups, abilities, races, ethnicities, cultural backgrounds, genders, gender identities, religious beliefs, and other lived experiences. AVP continually strives to promote a culture in which all employees feel included and where all voices are heard and appreciated. Whoever you are, wherever you call home, we want you to feel free to be your authentic self at work; and we want you to know that you will be authentically valued at AVP.

--How to Apply--

​​​​​​​If you have a prepared resume, attach it in PDF form. If you don't have a resume because you aren't even sure you're looking to change jobs, that's fine! An informal list of your work and education history are all we're looking for. A LinkedIn profile would work too.

Attach a PDF of your cover letter. In your cover letter:

• Introduce yourself and explain why this position is of interest to you, and you would be a great fit. Optionally, please include links to relevant past work and anything else that makes you look good, and describe your role in that work.
• Include a response to the following question: What are two of the most challenging obstacles you have faced when working with large datasets? And how did you overcome them?

More information at: https://blog.weareavp.com/avp-is-hiring-a-curious-creative-and-analytical-consultant-0