Careers

Hi there! It’s good to meet you. We are Advancing Analytics and we are really pleased you have found our careers page. Whether you are actively looking or just want to get a feel for what it’s like work with AA, there’s plenty here for you. Applying for any job can be really daunting; this page is designed to give you all the information you need to make an informed decision about applying to work with us. As a company, one of our values is transparency and we hope this page gives you a transparent view of careers at AA. Below should be a list of all current job openings, we’d love to hear from you!

What are we looking for?
That is a great question, and one which the consultant inside us answers “it depends”. It depends on what grade you join us on. It depends on what is happening in the tech landscape. It depends what strengths you have that we may not have thought about! At Advancing Analytics, everyone knows what grade everyone else is on and how much money they make. Nothing is hidden which makes lives easier, everyone knows where they stand. We have five levels and here is how we define them - all consultants fit somewhere on this scale:

• Graduates/Interns - We love working with placement year students, graduates, and postgraduates. Our graduate programme is designed to take you from your initial studies to industry and beyond. That said, we know not everyone has a degree but that doesn’t mean they aren’t right for our graduate scheme. One of our values is “come as you are”; if you are right for the role then it does not matter about your educational background - degree or no degree, a passion for learning and technology will take you a long way with Advancing Analytics.

• Junior Consultant - There are so many reasons for deciding to be a junior consultant. You may have experience working on a single project with a desire to work on bigger more varied projects. Well, this is what you will get experience doing at AA! Our Juniors get involved in all sorts of projects to broaden their experience rapidly. You may join as a Junior Data Engineer and help on an MLOps project, you may start as a Junior Data Scientist and work on implementing a Data Lakehouse. We want to give you the opportunity to experience different areas to help you understand where you want to specialise, as well as help round out your understanding of Advanced Analytics.

• Consultant - Our consultants help customers implement some of the worlds most sophisticated data analytics projects. Most of our consultants are “T-shaped”, meaning they understand a little about a lot and then have a deeper understanding of one or more main tools, processes, or capabilities. Our consultants are beginning to specialise in a particular area and start to be recognised internally and externally as an expert in their discipline.

• Senior Consultant - Our senior consultants have a deep understanding of their chosen specialism and a growing appreciation for wider architectures. They are respected as the “go-to person” for questions on their specialist subject. Our seniors run the day-to-day of most of our analytics projects, leading workshops, scrum ceremonies and client discussions. Our seniors typically hold Microsoft and Databricks certifications.

• Principal Consultant - Principals are at the top of our career ladder. They own technical and commercial relationships with customers and are trusted to perform deep architecture reviews, providing valuable recommendation roadmaps to our clients. They are experts in their chosen domain and can run a project as well as any project manager. They help grow Advancing Analytics through sales engagements with prospective customers. They can work both independently and lead multiple project teams. We could add more, but Camille Fournier puts it much better her blog: An incomplete list of skills every senior engineer needs to know

This list is not definitive. We are a fast-moving start-up and each day is different. One day you might be delivering a Data Lakehouse architecture, the next you might be performing a gap analysis on someone else’s project, or helping run the stand at a conference, being in a video on YouTube, appearing in a podcast or chilling in a vineyard on an away day. If you feel you meet one of these roles, keep reading.

What is the salary?
You will find all the salaries in the job adverts. We keep them there because they change. The market is always shifting and we want to make sure that we pay the right amount for our team. You will always find the salary on all our job adverts. Often people in tech talk about being in tech for tech, and that how much they get paid does not matter - but we all know it does and it is also perfectly fine to be in tech for the money!

What is our interview process?
We have a two-stage interview process. A lot of tech companies will have 5 or even 6 rounds of interviews. We feel we can make a good decision about someone in one interview, but we do our diligence in two.

• Stage one: “Knowing me, knowing you”. This is an opportunity to get to know each other. Typically, this lasts for 45 minutes with two of our team. It is an informal chat to understand who you are, what your experience is and what makes you tick. Interviews should never be one-sided. This is also your opportunity to size us up and see if we are right for you too.

• Stage two: “How do you learn?”. In this final stage you are interviewed by either Simon, our CTO, or by our principal team. We will ask you questions about your previous projects and how you implemented them. We want to know what you did, the decisions you made and why you made your choices. We want to understand how you researched those choices and how opinionated you are about your selection. We feel this is better than a technical test, because let’s face it, we all google, use Stack Overflow or phone a friend. You do not need to know the answer to every question, but you need to know how to get to the answer as quick as possible.

We are proud to be recognised as both a Great Place To Work, and as an Investor In People.

What benefits do we offer?
We value people over profits and we hope our benefits package reflects that:

• Annual Leave: You are entitled to 25 days annual leave each year (January - December). This rises to 28 days after 3 years (exclusive of UK bank holidays). If you are part-time, then this is reduced to the % of time worked.

• Birthday leave: No one works on their birthdays; you get a free day of annual leave on your birthday. If your birthday falls on a weekend or an awkward day, you can take the nearest Monday or Friday off instead.

• Charity Leave: If you support a charity or local non-profit, then we would like to help by offering 2 additional days to support a cause you are passionate about.

• Pension: Participation in the company pension scheme; company matched up-to 5%.

  Bonus: Participation in the company bonus scheme; 5% – 15% discretionary bonus based on company performance.

• Private Medical Healthcare: Individual private Bupa Healthcare.

• Private Dental Care: Individual private Bupa Dental Care.

• Health & Wellbeing fund: Staying fit is vital to a healthy work/life balance. Regular exercise promotes a healthy mental attitude. We will contribute £35 a month towards the cost of a gym membership/health subscription for you.

• Technology: Company laptop/equipment. This is refreshed every 3 years to ensure that you are working with the latest and greatest hardware. Everyone has the same high-end i9, 32GB RAM, GPU Deep Learning laptops.

• Home Office/Hot Desk Setup: If you are working from home then we will kit of your office with all you need to achieve your productivity zen. If you prefer to work around other people, then we can arrange a hot desk for you at a local co-working space.

• Phone & Broadband cover: £50 per month mobile phone and broadband allowance.

• Investment in learning: We have a pot of money set aside for training and conferences. You are entitled to claim against this pot for any training which is appropriate to your role.

• Cycle Scheme: If you fancy cycling to work, we have you covered.

• Speaker Bonus: Advancing Analytics are advocates for technology. We are passionate about what we do and we love to share our knowledge. If you present at an event on a topic aligned with our strategy, then you get an additional bonus.

• Electric car scheme - We have partnered with an EV company to offer you an electric car if you need one.

Remote first
At Advancing Analytics we believe in the power of being remote. Being remote means the freedom to hire the best team, regardless of where they are based. It means being able to work with companies 10 minutes down the road or 3000 miles away. It means less time commuting and more time delivering value for our customers. And most importantly, it means we can still do what we love the most - get out of bed late, walk our kids to school, hit the gym before work or spend extra time with our loved ones. But, remote working is not for everyone. Here are a few ways we try to bring everyone together as a distributed team:

• Full team away days: We all meet in person as a team at least once every 3 months. This is always a time to let off some steam and to catch everyone up on all the big decisions we need to make over the next 3 months. Examples of this include heading to big conferences such as Big Data London and SQLBits, heading to a vineyard in Wales, exploring Edinburgh or our latest away day heading to Centre Parcs.

• Regular team events: Just because we are not physically together, it does not mean we cannot be together. We try to run as many fun activities as we can such as designing doughnuts, breakfast mornings and games evenings.

• Company morning meeting: You sometimes miss just chatting about what you watched on Netflix last night or what your plans are for the weekend. We kick off each day with an optional 15-minute meeting where you can join and just chat about anything and everything. It is also fine to just sit there and listen to what everyone else did while you catch up on emails.

• Virtual office software: We have a virtual office which you can log in to and walk over to someone’s desk and start a conversation.

• Everything you need to work from home: We have a £1,000 fund for every new starter to get kitted out at home. If you need a desk (sitting or standing), monitors, a chair, headset, webcam, dock, you name it, we can arrange it, ready for when you start.

• Not a fan of working from home: Not a problem; we can get you set up in your local co-working space.

Value Driven
We are defined by our values and driven by our commitment to each of them. When a company is driven by purpose, they are set up to succeed.

• Advancing: We are opinionated about the tech we use and the customers we work with. We will not recommend a tool we do not believe in. We will not work with a customer who is not aligned to our way of thinking.

• Level Up: We believe in the power of sharing what we do and make. That could be in the form of an internal lunch and learn, an external blog, video, or podcast. We contribute to opensource technology. We host, sponsor and speak at technical events. We organise user groups. We love sharing what we do and we hope you do too.

• Zero Burnout: Far too often tech teams are stretched too thin. We want to make sure that you feel safe at work and part of that is protecting you from burning out. We do that with frequent time off projects, research and development days, attending events and mental health days.

• Come as you are: We want the best team we can have. To achieve this, you need a diverse team.

• Greta Goal: The best teams all pull in the same direction and we hope our team pulls towards sustainable solutions.

• Transparency: We are an open book. This page is our commitment to transparency. We want you to succeed.