At ASC we know that the mixture of experience, skills, and attitude are key ingredients in making a team succeed so we need the right people on board.
We value diversity in all its forms, including diversity of experience. It's been shown that people in underrepresented groups may only apply for a role when they meet all the role criteria, but if you think you have what it takes then apply anyway and let's see where it goes!
Who we are and what we do
Author-it Software Co. (ASC) is a world leading provider of on-premise and cloud-based products for authoring technical publications, e-learning and pharmaceutical information.
What does that mean for our customers? Our tools are used by some of the world’s largest organisations to enable reuse, reassembly and multiformat consumption of mission critical content. Our two software platforms, Docuvera and Author-it, enable the transformation of how our customers create and manage their content, leveraging a component first approach where content is broken down, easily assembled into documents, and reused across their organisation.
Our two products serve different industries; Docuvera’s focus is solving the problem of inefficiency in creating and updating documentation through the drug development lifecycle for biopharma for large global Life Science customers, while Author-it provides technical documentation, learning & development, and compliance solutions for hightech, manufacturing, energy and more, at enterprise scale across the globe.
Established in 2000, we are currently headquartered in Wellington, New Zealand. We have a team of over 100 people based mainly in New Zealand, Europe, and the United States, working across Technology, Product, Quality, Customer Success, Marketing, Sales, Finance and People Experience teams.
The part you’ll play
You’ll be an innovative Data Engineering Lead driving the development of our data analytics capabilities underpinning ASCs SaaS products and business operations. Responsibilities will include further establishing, expanding and optimizing our data platform architecture, as well as optimizing data flow and collection for cross functional teams.
As a Data Engineering Lead you will be pivotal to building our data engineering capability in support of ASC’s ambitions for expansion into data analytics and AI initiatives such as machine learning. You will provide support to our software engineers, other data engineers, data analysts and data scientists on data initiatives. Ensuring an optimal data delivery architecture and process within projects and operations.
The ideal candidate is an experienced data pipeline builder and is skilled at performing data transformation operations. These include operations such as data wrangling, data visualisation, data aggregation, training a statistical model and many other potential use cases.
You are driven by the challenge of building and optimizing data systems from concept to implementation. With strong self-organization skills, you excel at supporting the data needs of various team members, systems, and products, backed by high-level support from the Senior Technical Lead - Engineering & AI and the wider engineering team.
In this role, you will lead teams in delivering complex solutions to international customers, fostering an environment of collaborative success. You'll also have the opportunity for mentorship and coaching, which will support your professional journey and contribute to your growth.
What you’ll focus on
You'll collaborate with the CTO, Engineering Leads, Solution Architecture and Product Managers to define and develop ASC’s data strategy and roadmap, and establish and lead a Data Engineering programme, built upon a world-class data engineering culture where data engineers have the skills and autonomy needed to build and support high-quality solutions. You'll also ensure programme metrics are achieved, together with alignment to business vision and objectives.
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Team Leadership & Culture:
- Lead a Data Engineering team with a strong focus on AI (Generative, NLP), Machine Learning (ML), and advanced data engineering practices.
- Foster a world-class data engineering culture, ensuring team members have the skills and autonomy needed to build and support high-quality solutions.
- Ensure proper execution of team member duties and alignment with business vision and objectives.
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Technology & Tools:
- Assess and select new tools/technologies, including AI and ML frameworks, and implement processes in support of our data initiatives.
- Lead continuous improvement via an inspect and adapt approach, leveraging AI and ML to enhance processes.
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Data Platform Architecture:
- Develop, construct, test, and maintain data platform architectures that integrate AI and ML capabilities.
- Align the data platform architecture with business requirements to ensure a business-driven outcome.
- Build the infrastructure required for optimal extraction, transformation, and loading of data from a wide variety of data sources.
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Advanced Analytics & Machine Learning:
- Deploy sophisticated analytics programs, machine learning, and statistical methods for analytics and data scientist team members to assist them in building and optimizing ASC products into innovative industry leaders.
- Develop and implement AI (Generative and NLP) and ML models to drive predictive and prescriptive analytics.
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Data Security & Compliance:
- Keep data separated and secure across national boundaries through multiple AWS regions, ensuring compliance with data protection regulations.
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Data Management & Acquisition:
- Assemble large, complex data sets that meet functional/non-functional business requirements and issues. Discover opportunities for data acquisition.
- Use data to discover, identify, design, and implement internal process improvements: automating manual processes, optimizing data delivery, and re-designing infrastructure for greater scalability.
- Continuously identify ways to improve data reliability, efficiency, and quality.
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Data Modelling & Mining:
- Develop data set processes for data modelling, mining, and production. Prepare data for predictive and prescriptive modelling.
- Design and support optimized core datasets that provide structured and timely access to actionable business insights.
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Analytics Tools & Insights:
- Build analytics tools that utilize the data pipeline to provide actionable insights into partner and supplier analytics, customer analytics, operational efficiency, and other key business performance metrics.
- Work with stakeholders, including the Engineering, Product, Customer Success, and Operations teams, to assist with data-related technical issues and support their data infrastructure needs.
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Industry Consultation & Innovation:
- Consult with industry data and analytics experts to strive for greater functionality within the ASC data platform and systems.
- Stay updated with the latest advancements in AI, ML, and data engineering to continuously innovate and improve the data engineering practices.
What you’ll bring to the role
At ASC we know that the mixture of experience, skills and attitude are key ingredients in making a team succeed so we need the right people on board.
You will have this experience or knowledge
- Building processes supporting data transformation, data structures, metadata, dependency and workload management.
- A successful history of manipulating, processing and extracting value from large, disconnected datasets.
- Advanced working SQL knowledge and experience working with relational databases, query authoring (SQL) as well as working familiarity with a variety of databases.
- Experience building and optimizing ‘big data’ data pipelines, architectures and data sets, an understanding of message queuing, stream processing, and highly scalable ‘big data’ data stores with big data tools such as Hadoop, Apache Spark and Apache Kafka.
- Experience performing root cause analysis on internal and external data and processes to answer specific business questions and identify opportunities for improvement.
- Experience supporting and working with cross-functional teams in a dynamic environment.
You will have refined these skills
- Strong analytic skills related to working with unstructured datasets.
- Project management and organisational skills.
- Love learning and seeks to suggest and carry out improvements to the technologies and processes used as we grow our data capabilities.
- Your team-first mindset. Your way of working is collaborative
- A willingness to learn, to adapt to try new things, or take on a different perspective
- Resiliency, as change comes with the territory in a scale up tech environment
- A positive attitude and strong EQ to build and maintain a great connection with your team members across ASC
- The ability to think outside the box and focus on solutions
You’ll have these certifications or qualifications
- A graduate degree in Computer Science, Statistics, Informatics, Information Systems or another quantitative field.
How We Do Things Here
Our guiding principles, entitled How We Do Things Here, set the tone for life at ASC:
- We delight our customers
- We focus on solutions
- We act with integrity
- We nurture growth
- We put people first
That gives you an idea of how we work together.
Of the many qualities our diverse global team have, one that stands out is our passion for what we do. We take pride in our work and we are constantly learning and adapt to try new things or take on a different perspective. We enjoy and thrive in our rapidly changing environment, which requires flexibility and self-discipline, but, in return, we relish the excitement that we are part of a fast-paced scale up business working on transformative technology.
Why ASC is an awesome place to grow your career
We operate in a high trust environment, and we really walk the talk. We aspire for everyone to be themselves and be comfortable at work, so we put great emphasis on ensuring our people have what they need to be at their best. This includes:
- offering a digital first, fully flexible working style
- having modern tools and systems
- relaxed office hubs in some countries, stocked with free drinks and snacks
- offering extra paid time off for year end closedown and your birthday (with unlimited PTO in the USA)
- rewarding our long serving people with long service leave
- engaging everyone in reward and recognition programs
- access to various wellbeing platforms
- a focus on personal growth, including dedicated ‘tools down’ personal development time
- in the USA, we offer fully funded health benefits, like dental and medical
all within in a diverse, supportive, and inclusive global community.
Key info about our process
- This role is full time, Monday to Friday, and will be based remotely. We'll provide the tools you need to do your best work.
- Our process generally consists of 2 online interviews of around an hour each generally with one or two people, and a technical exercise if the role is in the Engineering/Tech space. We'll then request a minimum of two references and require a clean background check from your home country.
- If there is anything we should consider to enable your experience in our recruitment process to be more inclusive, please let us know.
- We'll close applications when we find the right person!
- For agencies, we have a preferred supplier arrangement with various global recruitment partners so please don't send us unsolicited CVs.