Data and AI Lead

About Multitudes

Kia ora! I’m Lauren, the founder of Multitudes (www.multitudes.com), and I’m writing this job description because the person in this role will be working closely with me.

At Multitudes, we're on a mission to help every team be equitable and high-performing, starting with software engineering teams. Our AI-enabled product turns metrics into action – catching where work is blocked, who's not getting enough support, and what's working best with AI, then nudging teams to act.

Our commitment to being human-centered goes beyond our product. We conduct academic research on AI impact, engineering productivity, and feedback quality, and we apply the same rigor to how we operate. See our data ethics principles for one example of how we put this into practice!

Our customers are among the best software engineering teams in the world – from Culture Amp in Australia, Veho in the US, Clara in Latin America, Quick Release in the UK, and more. We also have great backers from raising >$4M across two rounds – including Blackbird Ventures, Ellen Pao (of Reddit, Project Include), Jon Williams and Doug English (co-founders of Culture Amp), Vaughan Fergusson (founder of Vend, now Lightspeed), and more. Across our customers and our investors, we’ve been discerning – life is too short to work with jerks.

We're at an exciting inflection point: our product has become a need-to-have for teams navigating the AI transition, and we have tested go-to-market strategies plus a clear line of sight to our next milestone. You can help us get there.

About the opportunity: Data and AI Lead

This is a role where you’ll lead up everything data-related at Multitudes – you’ll get to shape our product, lead our research programme, and meet with customers, all to help teams use their data to improve.

You are a data scientist who cares deeply about people. You’re as comfortable having a conversation with a customer as you are building out an evaluation system for an LLM-enabled model. You’re also excited about leading up our research program at Multitudes.

Every week looks different, but your role will include:

(1) Leading the development of data & AI feature at Multitudes

We have several AI-enabled features already live in Multitudes (e.g., feedback quality and feedback themes) and many more on the roadmap. This work includes:

• Designing the approach for building our data features – working closely with me on the vision and then, depending on the feature, running an EDA on our existing data, building out an evaluation system, running model experiments, and more
• Participating in customer research – to ensure that you have the voice of the customer in your head throughout your work, you’ll run your own user research calls to see what they think about upcoming features.
• Work closely with our engineering team to productionize the new features. Alongside that, you’ll ensure that we have methods to get human feedback from our users, that we’re checking that model drift doesn’t impact accuracy, and that we’re building in ways that ensure easy swapping between models for cost and accuracy reasons. If you’re interested in data engineering, there’s opportunity to work with our engineering team to get involved in this too.

(2) Lead our research program

We have an established research program at Multitudes, with several papers and whitepapers behind us. In this AI era, our customers are asking lots of questions about what’s changed with AI – you’ll lead up our research program so we can get data to answer those questions. This includes:

• Identifying key research questions to focus on and designing research programmes to answer those questions
• Leading our relationships with academics – we work with world-leading academics (more here) – so you’ll work with them to get feedback on our work and identify areas for collaboration. You’ll also proactively reach out to new academics and build relationships.
• Working with industry partners (tech companies working in this space) to run research programmes, sharing insights with them and compiling insights for our analysis
• Once we’ve collected data, leading the paper-writing and review process to tell an accurate and compelling story from the data
• Stay on top of the latest research and trends, synthesizing what’s most relevant for our audience of engineering leaders

(3) Support customers and our team

You’ll ensure that the Multitudes team follows world-leading data and AI practices, and you’ll also jump in to support customers as needed:

• Ensuring that we’re baking the latest AI practices into our own ways of working at Multitudes – from engineering to design and operations, you’ll ensure that all the parts of the business are using the latest AI practices to be more effective in our work
• Everyone at Multitudes participates in customer success, and this role is no different. You’ll jump in to respond to customer questions, and will support with ad hoc customer data analysis as needed.
• There’s scope to get involved in account management as well, with supporting key customers during their trial and once they’ve come on board. As part of this, you’ll do data coaching – helping our customers spot the best insights from Multitudes, and then giving feedback on the product roadmap to help us give those insights in an automated way to more people
• We’re a lean team, so you’ll also support with anything else the team needs!

Throughout all the above, you’ll also live our values, which are the foundation of all that we do.

Reasons you might not want this role

We believe in transparency – it’s a core part of our product development ethos and also how we operate as a company. As part of that commitment, let me tell you some reasons now that you might not want to take this role – so you know what you would be signing up for!

• Some chaos: We’re a startup – so if you like clean systems, fixed routines, or knowing exactly what each day holds, this isn't for you. We need to adapt quickly when incidents or new information come up. The challenge is to prioritize well – to know what interruptions are worth doing – while still making time for the bigger work that has to be done around the changes.
• Lots of hats, and doing things you’ve never done before: If you don't like feeling like a beginner sometimes, this isn't for you. If you get excited by learning, it's a perk.
• You’ll often have to figure it out: We have a generous, caring team – but we’re also all overloaded. Success means being resourceful – searching for answers or finding people in your network who can help.
• Not a 9-to-5: As a lean team with a global customer base, questions and meetings span mornings (Americas) to evenings (Europe), with NZ and Aus in between – and Americas' Friday lands on our Saturday, which can mean more customer questions then. We support flexible work, but a customer issue does mean we need to adjust plans.
• You’ll have to think big and work small: You'll move between strategic systems thinking and tedious detail work – the trick is spotting themes worth automating while knowing where a human touch is still needed.

In your application, add a sentence telling me which of these “unselling” items you’re actually the most excited about and why.

Core skills

You bring the following skillset:

• You have a strong quantitative foundation – whether through academic study or equivalent professional experience.
• You're an experienced data scientist, comfortable with the full workflow from exploratory data analysis through to model development and evaluation.
• You have hands-on experience building and evaluating LLM-enabled systems
• You have enough data engineering knowledge to have productive conversations with engineers and, ideally, to get your hands dirty when needed – whether that's working with data pipelines, understanding how features get productionized, or thinking about model infrastructure.
• You’re a strong communicator – you can take complex concepts and explain it in ways that are understandable to broader audiences.
• You’re excited about conducting research; ideally you’ve even run your own research in the past, whether academic or applied.
• You have deep customer empathy. You don't just build models — you think about who uses the output and whether it's actually helping them.
• 5+ years of work experience

What we provide

• Opportunity to be part of an impact-led, fast-paced startup.
• A close-knit team – pastries and treats in the office are a regular occurrence
• Hybrid work options – we’re usually in the office on Mondays and Fridays, and working from home Tuesday-Thursday
• Commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion – both in how we work as a team and in our product development practices (see our data ethics principles for more).
• $149.5K total compensation ($130K base salary plus $19.5K equity/year)
• $500 annual Learning and Development budget and access to AI tools to help you succeed (you can even choose which one; we give each person a budget to allocate as they like).
• $1,000 one-off allowance for your home office setup.

We are committed to building a diverse and inclusive team; we cannot succeed in our mission without it. To that end, people from marginalised groups are particularly encouraged to apply.

Note that this is a full-time role based in Auckland, New Zealand.

Ready to apply?

Apply by emailing us at hiring@multitudes.com with:

• A copy of your CV
• A written response (max 200 words, excluding images): Share an example of data work you did. What was the goal, what did you do, and what was the outcome? Please include relevant screenshots.
• A video response of max 2 minutes: Why are you interested in this role and in working at Multitudes, and what prior experiences most set you up to succeed in this role? → To submit, email us a link to your response. Phone camera is fine, no editing needed. Videos are for internal review only and will not be shared externally

Note that we will only respond to email submissions, not LinkedIn ones.

Looking forward to hearing from you!

Lauren