Director of Data Strategy

Location: Remote eligible, NYC preferred. The ability to travel to NYC 4-6 times/year, required

ABOUT BASTA

Basta helps first-generation students turn college degrees into strong careers by transforming how they enter and advance in the workforce. Basta's flagship platform, Seekr, is powered by millions of data points from more than 70,000 first-generation career journeys and combines precision matching, personalized guidance, and structured pathways to help students secure strong first jobs. With a presence on 300+ campuses, Basta helps institutions scale career support while connecting employers to high-performing talent that traditional hiring systems often overlook. Basta advances economic mobility for first-generation students nationwide.

THE OPPORTUNITY

You’ve spent years doing the hands-on work of data– building pipelines, cleaning datasets, querying your way through complex problems– and you’re just as comfortable turning that analysis into a story a non-technical audience actually cares about. You’re the kind of person who walks in and immediately starts asking: what are we not seeing yet? What decisions could we be making better? Where is the data sitting unused?

You thrive in ambiguity. You don’t need a perfect roadmap to move forward. You’re energized by a fast-moving environment where the priorities evolve, the org is growing, and your judgment matters. You’re also a realist: you know the difference between the ideal solution and what is the right solution for the moment and will actually get adopted.

And you believe, genuinely, in what Basta does. First-generation students deserve access to strong career pathways, and you’re excited to help an organization that’s proving it’s possible.

ABOUT THE DIRECTOR OF DATA STRATEGY

This is a senior individual contributor role (with the possibility of people management based on previous experience) . You’ll be the primary data strategist for the organization — working across Programs, Revenue, Development, and Product to make sure data is shaping how we operate and grow. You’ll have a data engineer for a teammate/close collaborator and partnerships with our product engineering team, but you’ll also be hands-on: querying, building, analyzing, and communicating directly.

Here’s what your work will center on:

Turn data into decisions

• Own how Basta measures and monitors progress toward its goals — from defining the right metrics to making sure they’re visible, trusted, and used by the people who need them.
• Build and maintain dashboards and BI tools that non-technical teams actually use — intuitive, reliable, and built for how people really work.
• Proactively surface trends, gaps, and opportunities across our programs and partnerships that leadership might otherwise miss.

Tell the story

• Partner with our Development team to translate outcomes data into compelling, credible narratives for funders and grant reporting.
• Equip Revenue and external-facing teams with data-backed materials that articulate Basta’s value to university partners, employers, and state/regional partners.
• Make data accessible — build documentation, create clear visualizations, and support staff across the org in using data more confidently.

Build, maintain, and keep evolving the infrastructure

• Keep our data pipelines running reliably — including our data warehouse, ETL pipelines, and system integrations — and evolve them as our programs and partnerships grow.
• Build new pipelines, tools, dashboards, and integrations when the work calls for it. We haven’t hit the ceiling on what we need and we need someone who can create, not just maintain.
• Partner with Product and Engineering to ensure data flowing from Seekr is structured and usable for internal analysis and external reporting.
• Evaluate emerging tools — including AI-powered approaches — and make pragmatic decisions about what’s actually worth adopting. We’re enthusiastic about new solutions, not just new technology for its own sake.
• Partner closely with Ops leaders to understand incoming workflows and organizational changes — and anticipate where they'll put pressure on data systems before that pressure becomes a problem.
• Maintain strong data quality practices and documentation so the whole org can trust what they’re looking at.

Stay curious and keep finding the next thing

• Bring genuine curiosity to how Basta collects and uses data — always asking what we’re missing, what we could do faster, and what we haven’t thought to look at yet.
• Identify where we’re leaving data value on the table and bring concrete proposals — and often, the actual solution — for how to capture it.
• As the org evolves, our data needs evolve too. This role requires someone who’s energized by that, not unsettled by it.

WHAT YOU BRING

We care about what you can actually do, not just the years on your resume. That said — this role requires real depth, and we’ll be looking for evidence of it.

• You have strong, hands-on SQL skills and solid experience in data analysis — you know your way around analytical frameworks, can work through a complex dataset independently, and translate what you find into something actionable.
• You build things. Pipelines, dashboards, integrations, tools — when something needs to exist and doesn’t, you figure out how to make it happen.
• You’ve built dashboards and BI tools. You know how to design for a non-technical audience and build things they’ll use.
• You have direct - or related - experience in the nonprofit or impact sector — evaluating program data, designing outcomes measurement, and funder-facing reporting. You understand what a grant proposal actually needs.
• You can tell a story with data. You’ve translated analysis into narratives for leadership, funders, and external partners and seen results.
• You think in systems. You can see how an operational change upstream affects data integrity downstream, and you flag it before it breaks something — not after.
• You work well across teams. You’ve built trust with program teams, revenue teams, product teams — and you know how to translate between technical and non-technical collaborators.
• You move well in ambiguity. You don’t wait for a perfect spec to get started, and you know how to prioritize when everything feels urgent.
• You’re genuinely curious and solutions-oriented. You’re always asking if there’s a smarter way to do something — and you use every tool available, including AI, to find out. You see new technology as a means to better work, not an end in itself.

Experience level: roughly 8–10 years working with data in a professional setting, with meaningful time in the nonprofit or impact sector. We’ll consider equivalent combinations of experience.

WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE:

Our data systems are in good shape. The trust is there. The infrastructure works. Year one in this role is about doing exciting things with a solid foundation. Here’s what that looks like in practice:

• Program, Revenue, and leadership teams are regularly using data to make decisions — not just accessing dashboards, but genuinely adjusting priorities, evaluating performance, and asking better questions because of what they’re seeing.
• Our outcomes collection process is consistent and delivers up-to-date information. We have a clear, reliable system for capturing what’s happening across our programs — and the data it produces is trusted and timely.
• Impact measurement is cleaner and more actionable — key metrics are well-defined, used consistently across teams, and showing up in the conversations that matter.
• Our Development and Revenue teams have stronger, more data-driven narratives — grant reporting is more compelling, partner conversations are better supported, and we can articulate our value clearly to funders, universities, and employers.
• Data from Seekr is better integrated into how we analyze and report — you’ve worked with Product and Engineering to make that connection tighter and more useful.
• There’s less opacity across the board — staff know what data exists, where it lives, and where their requests stand. Working with data feels accessible, not like a black box.
• You’ve become a thought partner people seek out — not just for analysis, but for what the analysis means and what to do about it.
• You’ve identified and built at least one or two meaningful new capabilities — tools, pipelines, or approaches — that didn’t exist when you arrived.