Director of Customer Data & Data Science
Cafeyn · Paris, France · hybrid
Join Cafeyn: Where Innovation Meets InspirationAt Cafeyn, we're redefining the way people discover, access, and enjoy premium digital content. Since 2006, we've evolved into one of Europe's leading digital reading platforms, serving more than 2 million users worldwide with unlimited, personalized access to thousands of newspapers and magazines.
Our ambition goes beyond news. Through Cafeyn, Milibris, Kidjo and Readly, we create innovative digital content experiences that inform, entertain and inspire millions of users every day.
Together, the Group now operates across 15 markets, serves 2.5 million users, and provides access to more than 9.500 publications from 2500 partner publishers.
If you're passionate about building strategic partnerships, driving commercial growth and shaping the future of digital media, we'd love to meet you.
As Cafeyn continues to grow, the Group is accelerating its transformation towards a truly data-driven organization, leveraging Customer Data and Artificial Intelligence to improve business performance, enhance product innovation and develop new revenue streams.
As Director of Customer Data & Data Science, you will define and lead Cafeyn's Customer Data strategy, transforming data into a strategic asset that drives business decisions, product development and revenue growth.
Reporting into the Group's leadership structure, you will act as the primary ambassador for Customer Data, working closely with the Executive Committee, Marketing, Product, Content, Business and Technology teams.
Your mandate will be twofold: maximize the business value of customer data and accelerate the development of AI-powered products.
Beyond delivering insights and tools, you will challenge existing business practices, identify opportunities for improvement and ensure that data becomes a driver of strategic decision-making rather than simply a reporting function.
You will lead the restructured Data Analysis and Data Science teams, establish the foundations for scalable Data adoption, and work closely with Data Engineering to ensure the reliability, accessibility and performance of Cafeyn's data infrastructure.
Your responsibilities1. Define the Customer Data strategy and drive business performance- Define and implement Cafeyn Group's Customer Data strategy, aligned with the Group's overall business priorities and growth ambitions.
- Act as the primary representative of Customer Data at Executive Committee level, translating strategic priorities into actionable data initiatives and measurable business outcomes.
- Develop a comprehensive understanding of customer behaviour, engagement, retention and monetization across Cafeyn's B2C, B2B2C, B2B and CDS business models.
- Ensure that business teams have access to reliable, relevant and actionable dashboards, analyses and performance indicators to identify challenges, understand underlying trends and improve business performance.
- Structure KPI frameworks and performance funnels across Marketing, Product, Content and Business, identifying opportunities to optimize acquisition, engagement, conversion, retention and revenue.
- Develop predictive capabilities, particularly churn prevention models, to anticipate customer behaviour and enable proactive retention strategies.
- Challenge business stakeholders constructively, moving beyond a traditional internal service-provider relationship to become a strategic business partner who questions assumptions and helps identify new opportunities.
- Establish robust data governance policies, ensuring data quality, integrity, accessibility and consistent usage across the organization.
- Drive data literacy and foster a data-driven culture, empowering teams to incorporate data into their day-to-day decisions.
2. Develop the data monetization strategy- Define Cafeyn's Customer Data monetization strategy, supporting the diversification of the Group's revenue streams.
- Identify opportunities to create value from first-party data, audience insights and customer segmentation, particularly in relation to advertising and B2B commercial offerings.
- Build the data foundations required for effective audience activation, including identity resolution, tagging, segmentation and measurement.
- Work closely with Marketing, Sales, Business and Content teams to translate customer insights into new commercial opportunities and scalable revenue-generating initiatives.
- Assess the potential of data products and services, ensuring that monetization initiatives are commercially relevant, technically feasible and aligned with applicable privacy and regulatory requirements.
3. Lead Data Science, AI-powered product innovation and experimentation- Lead Cafeyn's Data Science capability, managing a team of 2–3 Data Scientists responsible for developing and deploying AI-driven product features.
- Define the Data Science roadmap in close collaboration with Product and Technology leadership, ensuring that initiatives address meaningful customer needs and deliver measurable value.
- Establish the processes, methodologies and operating conditions required to accelerate the delivery, deployment and continuous improvement of Data Science developments.
- Oversee the evolution of AI-powered product capabilities, including personalized recommendations, the automated daily digest feature, semantic search and future content discovery innovations.
- Ensure that Data Science initiatives are prioritized according to their expected impact, feasibility and alignment with Cafeyn's product strategy.
- Drive the transition from experimentation to production, improving delivery predictability, model performance and the operational impact of AI-powered features.
- Partner closely with Product teams to measure the impact of AI innovations on engagement, retention, customer satisfaction and business performance.
- Own the tooling and technical enablement of Cafeyn's A/B testing framework, using Statsig to support a scalable, quantitative experimentation capability.
- Work closely with Product teams, who own the testing strategy and prioritization, to ensure that the underlying tooling enables reliable experiments, robust statistical analysis and informed product decisions.
- Establish clear measurement practices to evaluate the impact of AI initiatives and experimentation on operational efficiency and product performance.
4. Partner with Data Engineering to build scalable data foundations- Act as the primary internal interface between Customer Data, Data Science and the Data Engineering team, ensuring that the data platform meets current and future business needs.
- Work closely with Data Engineering leadership to assess whether the existing architecture can support Cafeyn's strategic ambitions, growing data volumes and evolving analytical requirements.
- Define data availability, reliability, integrity and completeness requirements, establishing clear service-level agreements (SLAs) and access policies.
- Ensure that the right data is accessible to the right teams, through the appropriate tools and within the required timeframes, from real-time applications to historical and cold-storage environments.
- Guide decisions around data accessibility, storage costs and platform scalability, ensuring that infrastructure choices support both advanced analytics and production-grade AI applications.
- Anticipate the data requirements of new business models, customer activation initiatives and AI-powered product features, aligning the data roadmap with the broader Technology strategy.
5. Build and develop high-performing teams- Lead and develop the restructured Product Data and Data Science organization, bringing together complementary analytical, machine learning and product innovation capabilities.
- Manage a team comprising two Senior Data Analysts, one Machine Learning expert focused on predictive modelling, and a Data Science team of 2–3 specialists.
- Establish clear priori