Interesting Data Gigs # 80: A "Hidden Secret" to find open roles every week

Presented by

If you are not a subscriber of Interesting Data Gigs, join 5002 Data geeks (between this newsletter here, its Substack copy, and LinkedIn) that receive it directly in their inbox each week — it’s free.

Want to advertise here? Apply here  

A "Hidden Secret" to find open roles every week

Hey Data Geek.

This week I wanted to share with you a little secret I’ve used thousands of times to find new open roles every single week.

I believe not many people use this “secret” (not so secret), and it’s simpler than you think.

The secret: Use the Talent Networks of Venture Capital firms. That’s it.

Many top VC firms out there like Emergence Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, First Round Capital, Index Ventures, Sequoia Capital, and many more.

All of them have a “Talent Network” where you can filter the open roles by location, stage of the company, funding, size of the company, industry, and more.

Think about this as a “Reverse Engineering Way” to find a new role: instead of applying for ten roles, you can filter the kind of role you want, the target location (or locations), the size of the company, etc; and every week these “networks” will send you roles that fit to your criteria.

Then, it’s your job to make a good impression on the application.

Let me put an example with Emergence Capital’s Talent Network. Let’s say you want a remote Data Engineer role, inside the United States, in a company with more than 1000 and less than 5000 employees:

As you can see, 41 jobs for Data Engineers fit those criteria. Now, you see the open roles, and you decide that the role you want is the one from Gusto.

Now, it’s time to start the Research Phase (The most important part of a job application). This is what I’ve found in just 30 minutes about Gusto:

• It’s a small business champion working with more than 300,000 businesses around the globe

• Total funding: $741 Million

• Valuation: $10 Billion

• ARR: $500 Million

• Layoff? Yes

• They are doing a small business contest called “The Gusto Impact Award” for businesses located in three US cities: Atlanta, Austin, and Orlando

• Tech stack: Ruby on Rails is huge in the company

• Data Engineering at Gusto? Read this, this, and this, or chat with the Data Engineers of the company

• And according to Tomer London (CPO and co-founder of the company), they are not just looking for Data Engineers:

Now, it’s time for the Job Application Phase.

In this phase, you will prepare yourself to chat with former and current employees, writing your learnings from your research and sharing with them your thoughts, but more importantly: listening about the problems they want to solve, especially on the Data Engineering side.

Then take all that and elaborate a plan on how you could solve some of those problems. This will show you have a real interest in the job and you are willing to go beyond the simple job application.

If you do that in every job application, I guarantee you will be in a better position than 90% of people who apply for the same role.

Time to take action, my friend.

Good luck

Who is hiring this week?

• Yuxin Zhu from Replo is hiring across the board

• Douglas Flora from EnterpriseDB is hiring Product Marketing people 

• Ali Rahimi-Vahed, Ph.D from Universal is hiring a Data Scientist

Good luck with your application

Interesting resources of the week

• AWS Graviton Weekly # 74

• How to get 💩 done as a software engineer, by Jordan Cutler

Tool of the week: Teal

Marcos out

Want to advertise here? Apply here