Jathaniel Spengler

jayspengler@gmail.com
(+31) 06 2732 5474
Amsterdam, NL

Data expert and experienced business leader with success in heavily regulated and data- intensive markets. Specializes in driving operational excellence, impactful data modeling, and managing diverse teams. Can speak data at any level, from engineers to sales to executives.


Experience

Data Consultant

Yawning Dog Insights B.V.

Founder of data consulting firm, combining enterprise data tooling with a personalized touch.

  • Work with international teams to build data pipelines and internal tools.
  • Advise on data standards and embed data best practices in operational tools.
  • Partnered with FUSE Oregon to study correlation between housing market and houselessness and generate public policy advocacy statement.
  • Created data tool for sales/marketing team of food allergy newsletter enabling the sizing and prioritization of customer cohorts. Migrated from legacy system to Snowflake DWH.
  • 2023 - Present

    Data Lead

    Mozart Data

    First data hire at a Y Combinator 2020 startup, developing reporting for sales/product, onboarding and supporting customers, and develop product for a data engineering and analytics consulting software.

  • Manage product development roadmap, focusing on empowering data engineers at startup speed (weekly sprint / release cycle).
  • Collect customer feedback, prioritize and structure into impactful features.
  • Migrate customer from legacy warehouse to modern data stack built on DBT and snowflake with a custom SQL transformation layer.
  • Used DBT / Python to clean, validate and transform data sets into a structured DWH.
  • Train semi-technical customers on best practices to elevate data literacy.
  • Developed growth personas for marketing team to effectively communicate value proposition- improving customer acquisition cost by over 30%.
  • Grew business from 1 to 100 enterprise customers.
  • 2021 - 2023

    Director of Growth Analytics, General Manager

    Eaze

    Founding member of growth analytics team, kicking off an era of unprecedented revenue expansion. Worked closely with engineering and product teams to develop the service- growing the active user base by 20x. Oversaw a $22MM budget and over 4 million deliveries.

  • Oversaw $22MM annual budget and over 4 million deliveries.
  • Designed and ran monthly business reviews (MBR) reporting structure to improve operational performance of dispensary partners.
  • Developed machine learning model for predicting customer demand, reducing inventory stockouts by 8% and improving delivery time with no increase to cost-per-delivery.
  • Created automated delivery driver shift-plan system to scale.
  • Developed AML model, reducing chargeback rate by over 12% in highly regulated industry.
  • Created dispensary KPI operational dashboard which improved delivery times and reduced costs over 20%, resulting in $6MM savings per year.
  • Rapidly tested growth ideas - sizing, testing and iterating customer and driver acquisition strategies on a weekly sprint cadence.
  • Partnered with business development and legal teams to shape contract negotiations.
  • Managed a cross-functional team of 15 analysts, engineers, and growth associates.
  • 2017 - 2021

    Engineering Manager

    General Motors (Cruise Division)

    Joined the Autonomous Vehicle division at Cruise after GM acquired Sidecar. Managed a team of 6 data engineers and analysts, developed reporting infrastructure and internal apps.

  • >Designed technical interface for integration with OnStar and autonomous vehicle routing system.
  • Created data tool to segment ROS log files and provide engineers and operations with access to car diagnostic data. Reduced latency of data requests by several magnitudes.
  • Held weekly sessions to advise engineers on database best practices.
  • 2016 - 2017

    Head of Analytics

    Sidecar

    Joined Sidecar as the 5th employee. Built analytics stack and developed product features and strategy. Hired teams of people to and oversaw a seamless integration of information and people with fast-paced company strategy.

  • Designed, created, and coded a comprehensive field operations data suite.
  • Presented analytics update at weekly company all-hands meetings.
  • Designed and ran monthly MBR with executive and general manager regional teams.
  • Modeled out ridesharing algorithms in R/python using machine learning/regression.
  • Pioneered shared-rides and dynamic pricing two years before Uber.
  • Rapidly tested product features focused on customer acquisition and retention incentives.
  • Proposed, developed, and implemented driver evaluation system to distinguish between malicious actors and drivers underperforming their potential.
  • SQL Czar - coached engineer on SQL best practices and limit database bottlenecking.
  • Successfully pivoted business to package delivery model and sold the company for a graceful exit.
  • Grew product from inception to over 200,000 monthly active users and millions of trips.
  • 2012 - 2016

    Product Manager

    Fisher Investments Asset Managmenet

    Owned all changes for CRM system supporting 20k customers. Learned to invest.

  • Planned and supervised changes for CRM system (.NET based with python middle tier).
  • Created metadata repository (“The Data Dictionary”) to catalogue legacy data storage.
  • Oversaw implementation of HP Extream - reducing RFP response time over 60.
  • Project lead on migration from Access to SQL server.
  • 2012 - 2016

    Education

    University of Western Washington

    Bachelor of Science
    Major: Economics
    Minor: Computer Science

    GPA: 3.83

    2001 - 2005

    Skills

    Skills I practice                                           Tools I've used
    • SQL (Postgres, NoSQL)
    • Python / R
    • Machine Learning
    • Cost / Lifecycle Modeling
    • Product / Change Management
    • Advanced Excel
    • AWS / Azure / GCP
    • DBT / Airflow / Stitch
    • Tableau / PowerBI / Mode
    • Spark / Databricks
    • Docker / Kubernetes
    • Terraform / Ansible

    Interests

    Apart from being a data scientist, I enjoy most of my time being outdoors. In the winter, I am an avid snowboarder and aspiring photographer.

    I also enjoy developing rogue-like indie games and playing the cello. I am an aspiring chef, and I spend a large amount of my free time thinking how to leverage data science in support of climate and social justice.