This is my work right now. Through a stroke of fate aka unexpected layoff’s of remote staff at my last organization, I found myself looking for something challenging that would pair data with impact, and via an old relationship with a former board member, and currently the CEO, I found myself jumping aboard as the Chief Data Officer at Alluma (we were Social Interest Solutions until last week!). My job, and maybe yours too, is to build a data practice inside an organization that is not (yet) a data -informed operation. We’re not a startup, but it’s a greenfield for the data work here, and the potential is really exciting.

What should you expect? By the end of this year we’ll have brought the team together, beginning with a data governance/BI lead, then a Data Engineer (hellooooo we’re hiring), then a senior data scientist and finally a data viz/web designer person who loves building on the web with data. One of the values at Alluma is that we’re small but mighty, and a small data team of multi-disciplinary people will be able to achieve a whole lot, and hopefully have fun in the process. We’ll be heavily relying on open source tools, and we’ll be leveraging the learnings from 18F and others on managing remote teams.

Who Are You?

Not heard of us? Well, we’ve been innovating in the field of access to health and food for over 15 years, we’ve got great policy expertise, strong dev teams and we’re building an innovation pipeline to uncover new ways to serve people better. Our leadership is diverse, and our values speak to the importance of designing ethically for the people who rely on the systems we support for their survival.

In my short tenure so far I’m impressed by our ability to blend policy (big P as in regulations) with human centered design and modern tech and design skills to build products that work the way we want government to really work. We don’t call ourselves #CivicTech nor #GovTech, we fit more in the #SocialImpact world as a nonprofit who builds products for state and local government, provides policy guidance and seeks to help the people who need the benefits to succeed in their current situation.

Culture

Our GlassDoor reviews look pretty rough, but our newer team of senior leaders are doing the right things to change Alluma for the better, and I’m confident we’re getting stronger and healthier as an organization. For our data team, we’ll be a mix of local and remote staff, and we’ll be building a culture together, working more openly (publishing practice guides and tools on GitHub), building the capacity of people across the organization and designing our team culture to ensure all people have a voice, and can shape our work and impact.

So keep your ears open as these roles, and new ones for our Tech & Design team as they come up this year, you’ll get to work on things that matter and enjoy the team we build together. If you’re as much a people and process person as you are a data geek, join us!