TL;DR: My DS/analytics role has expanded into senior-level data/platform engineering and client leadership, but my title, pay, and promotion path haven’t kept up.
Update: Had a really good 1:1 today. My boss agreed my scope has grown beyond the JD, asked me to document the differences, and wants me to draft a senior-level JD that reflects what I’m actually doing. We also discussed hiring someone junior under me to take on some analytics work. He wants to use this to support a strong year-end rating and promotion, though he says off-cycle promotions are currently blocked by policy.
I am going to keep applying externally though. Nothing in writing yet.
I’ve been in data science/analytics for about 11 years. Most of my earlier career was at a Fortune 100 financial company, where I eventually became a Data Science Manager and led a small team forecasting risk metrics that fed into public earnings reporting. I’m now a Big Data Analytics Manager at a fintech/fraud prevention company, working remotely in the US.
The reason I’m posting is that my job has changed pretty dramatically from what I was hired to do, and I’m having trouble figuring out what the role actually is anymore. My official job description is basically an Implementation Manager description with some analytics language added. It says things like “leverages tools built by the Implementation Manager to analyze big data” and asks for proficiency in Python, Spark, or SQL.
That’s pretty far from what I’m actually doing now. We process 1B+ transactions a year, and I’m working on a novel, high-visibility real-time fraud use case for one of our three largest clients. They’re also notoriously difficult to work with.
On the technical side, I’m adding custom platform capabilities for data ingestion and operationalizing ML models, building secure pipelines, doing Spark/PySpark processing, shell automation, SFTP workflows, and building reporting systems that run essentially autonomously. I’m hands-on with almost all of that work, but I’m also project managing the data engineering effort across both companies, coordinating our teams with the client’s technical teams to actually get this stuff into production. Then I’m still doing the analytics on top of the systems I built.
None of my previous responsibilities really went away either. I still manage other technical projects, work directly with the client, and regularly present analytical insights and financial reporting to their executive leadership. I was also heavily involved in work that helped roughly double the size of this client’s contract, which in turn expanded my scope further as we added products and took on more of their transaction volume.
So I’ve ended up doing some weird combination of data science, data/platform engineering, analytics, reporting, project management and client leadership. I actually like the engineering work, so this isn’t a complaint about having to code. I’m more confused about how a role that was originally defined as basically implementation + analytics ended up owning this much production engineering, platform work and client delivery without the classification changing.
The leveling side is where it gets stranger. My boss specifically encouraged me to interview for a Senior Manager opening on our own team. He’d been giving me very positive feedback, telling me he trusted me and that I’d have opportunities, so I went through the full interview process and eventually made it to the VP. During that interview, the VP said something along the lines of, “Well, who else would we hire? You’re already doing the work.” Then later in the conversation he asked whether they’d have to backfill my current position if they promoted me. I ultimately didn’t get the job.
I obviously have no way of knowing whether that question was decisive, but the timing has always bothered me. They left the Senior Manager role open for months and eventually filled the need with another person at the same level I’m currently at rather than hiring a Senior Manager. When I later raised compensation with my boss, the feedback was still positive, but he said I was progressing within the “normal range for my role.”
For additional context, I’m at about $129k base / $148k total comp and I’m already well below the midpoint of the salary band for my existing role. That’s part of what made me start looking harder at whether the role itself is even classified correctly.
For people who have been around senior DS/data organizations, would you still consider this a data science/analytics management role, or at this point is it really some form of data/platform engineering or technical data leadership? I’m also curious how you’d interpret the promotion sequence. Am I reading too much into the backfill question, or does this sound like the classic problem of becoming more valuable in your current seat than the company wants you to be somewhere else?
