Hello world! Welcome to Charles River Data’s analytics blog
Hello world!
We are Charles River Data — a new data science consultancy based in the US, but with a global presence. Our team of builders and technology enthusiasts has decades of experience in consulting, industry and big tech, and we use our passion and expertise in data to help our clients solve tough problems.
This blog on Medium is meant to be our pulpit from which to share learnings from the frontier of our work, always with our clients’ permission. We encourage readers to comment on our methods and share their views.
As an opening salvo to our blog, we would like to outline our objectives as early-stage founders. Today we will cover our:
- Mission
- Value Proposition
- Clients (Fee Structure / Client Promise)
- People (Comp Structure / Employee Promise), and
- Tools
CRD’s Mission
We make the world more data-driven for our clients. And we offer an alternative to the traditional corporate path for our world-class data talent, with an emphasis on transparency, impact and merit.
Our Value Proposition
Tactically, we are a professional services firm — so we offer highly specialized analytics & engineering talent for hire on a project-level basis. We seek to deliver value in each project, and we hold ourselves accountable to generate results for our clients. We measure value through live pilots/experiments, our preferred way to observe the results of our models in real life before drawing any conclusions.
Our Clients
We support clients who are experienced engineering or business leaders at fast growing start-ups, or large corporations that have a product or a service with a significant data footprint.
We aim to attract clients with a good understanding of their data problem, and as such, we can offer lower overhead and more competitive bids for projects. We feel our offer is differentiated by our rates (lower overhead than MBB) and top-quality talent (all 5+ years top-tier firms or elite recent grads). And we can be nimble as a small firm, for example, by pausing or pivoting projects when we encounter externally-driven delays, rather than underdelivering or sending a change request.
Our People
We value our talent, because CRD’s people are its greatest asset. As such, we aim to treat each data scientist and engineer with the respect and transparency they deserve as they grow in their careers. Here are some programs we have in force today to achieve this goal:
- CRD compensates its staff for their contributions to the firm on an open pay scale.
- Billable rates are a function of skills and experience delivering client-facing work, and openly listed for all members of the team.
- Promotion schedules are transparent and set to a sliding scale every six months (or billable hours equivalent). Clear feedback is provided at the midpoint and the end of each project, so team members know where they stand and which areas for development they should focus on to get to the next level.
- Partnership track is available for all employees, and apprenticeship in the business development process is offered to team members looking to enter a revenue-generating role at CRD.
- Referrals are also rewarded — because we love working with great people.
Our Tools
We keep a state of the art technology stack:
- Google Cloud, souped up VMs, high-end Macbooks. Data warehouses like BigQuery and Snowflake to process terabytes of data, along with in memory solutions for sub-second responses.
- GitHub following Google’s style guide (based on Mike’s 8-year tenure there) with CI/CD.
- Open-source tools where possible, allowing us to use the latest tech (hugging face, langchain, jupyter lab, QGIS and of course the usual suspects of scikit, pytorch, plotly, seaborn, etc) — along with access to commercial software to round out our toolkit (ex. Tableau, ArcGIS, DataGrip).
In conclusion
We hope this article was a valuable introduction to Charles River Data and our blog. We look forward to sharing more about our evolution as a firm and deep dives into our projects and techniques.
Gleb Drobkov & Michael Dezube, Co-Founders of Charles River Data
