YNAB: Humbly Confident Data Analyst

Headquarters: Worldwide! We’re fully remote.

URL: https://www.ynab.com/

Humbly Confident Data Analyst

We’re YNAB (“why-nab”), a product company with a mission: to help people get good at money so they never worry about money again. For over 20 years, YNAB has been changing lives—and people can’t stop telling their friends about it. Think: debt paid off, marriages strengthened, goals achieved, stress erased, and sleep finally restored. But don’t just take our word for it—dive into our vibrant communities on Facebook, TikTok, and Reddit (really!) or skim through our glowing app reviews. You’ll quickly see why people rave about YNAB and why we’re so passionate about creating something that truly changes lives for the better. 

Join us! We’re looking for a Data Analyst to join our tiny but mighty team of two. Our “data friends”, as they are so fondly called, help people in every department at YNAB make decisions more confidently. They advocate for the quantitative perspective and ensure that strategic conversations balance measurable impact with domain expertise. 

This is a hands-on role that covers the full spectrum of data work, from technical to strategic. You won’t just explain what happened; you’ll transform data into clear, opinionated recommendations and help shape what we do next. You’ll also be a true multiplier, building systems that allow others at YNAB to self-serve with confidence. If this resonates with you, you’re our target audience—please read on.

Hard Requirements

For this role, you must:

• Live in the United States, and be authorized to work here without sponsorship.

• Have at least 3 years of experience working in the data field in a product-driven environment.

• Have experience with some Modern Data Stack tools (e.g. Snowflake/Databricks/BigQuery, dbt, Fivetran/Airbyte, Amplitude/Mixpanel, Metabase/Looker/Tableau).

• Have experience writing and maintaining SQL in a production environment (e.g., dbt models, shared queries, dashboards).

• Be confident in and passionate about using AI to do your job better, while knowing what is worth not outsourcing.

Preferred Qualifications

These aren’t required, but are likely to set you up for success:

• Experience at a small-to-mid size company, where you wore multiple hats and worked without a dedicated data engineering team beneath you.

• Experience working across multiple stakeholder groups.

• B2C subscription/SaaS experience.

• Experience designing and analyzing A/B tests.

Note: If you believe you’re a fit for this role, but don’t meet our preferred qualifications, we still encourage you to apply. While our hard requirements are non-negotiable, we’re otherwise open-minded, and don’t need you to be the perfect candidate on paper. 

That’s a quick snapshot of what we’re looking for. Before we go further, let’s make sure you’re excited about working with us. We’ll share more about YNAB, then dive into the role details and application process (be sure to read all the way to the end!).

YNAB started in 2004 and we haven’t taken any outside funding—we’re established, profitable, and in this for the long haul. We have one overarching requirement when it comes to joining our team: our original Core Value Manifesto has to really click with you. If you’re nodding emphatically while reading it, you’ll probably like it here!

We live our Core Values every day at YNAB, and we mean it when we say we are an equal opportunity employer. We believe a diversity of backgrounds, abilities, and experiences is critical to our success, and we are passionate about creating a welcoming and supportive environment for every employee. All are encouraged to apply as we continue growing a smart, hard-working, and diverse team that loves building something that matters.

We also work really hard, together, to make working at YNAB an amazing experience. We’re (humbly) proud to have received many of Fortune’s “Great Place to Work” awards over the years, including #1 two years in a row! We have a team of truly exceptional people—the kind you’ll be delighted to work with. Let’s introduce you to a few of them!

You’ll work most closely with our data team, Eva and Jason:

Eva leads our Data team, and will be your manager. Her eyes light up talking about the subjectivity of even the hardest numbers. She owns how we define and measure what success looks like at YNAB, and spends a lot of her time making sure those definitions actually drive what we do. She cares less about dashboards as deliverables and more about how data changes the decisions we make, which means she’ll push you to ask better questions as much as she’ll trust you to find the answers. Having moved from Germany to Mexico, she’s either craving pretzels or savoring blue corn tortillas and mole, usually with knitting in her lap.

Jason will be your fellow analyst; he’s the Marketing team’s go-to person for all things data. He’s an analytical mind, but works in his role to find deep understanding of what YNAB efforts most resonate with new users. Ultimately, he’s a storyteller who often asks “why?”. Living in Asheville, NC, he spends a lot of time outside cultivating a garden, hiking with his dog, and playing with his (human) son.

And then of course you’ll cross paths with—well—probably everyone else at YNAB. People like Jacob, Kathryn, or Brady (in Product), or Ben, Reema, or Lauren (in Support, Marketing, and Operations, respectively). We can’t list everyone, but we can say that we are all excited to get to know you!

Now that you’ve learned about some of your future teammates, let’s talk more about what it’s like to work here.

Building a Good Company

At YNAB, we think one of the best things we can offer is the chance to do meaningful work alongside people you respect, admire, and genuinely enjoy. And we mean that—from the beginning, we’ve been intentional about creating the company we want to work for. 

Along the way, we’ve learned that great teams aren’t built on perks or fancy titles—they’re built by bringing together high performers who thrive on tough challenges and share a commitment to doing exceptional work. We value discipline and ownership over unnecessary layers of process, and look for people who wake up excited to get important things done. 

That’s the team we’re building at YNAB: one that cares deeply, works pragmatically, and always finds time to laugh (mostly at ourselves).

Live Anywhere in the U.S.

We’ve always been a fully remote team, and have people all over the world. For this particular position, however, we’re only considering candidates based in the United States. Anywhere in the U.S. is fair game, just make sure you have a reliable internet connection. 

Work Four Days a Week

We’ve adopted a four-day work week and rarely work more than that. There are occasions and seasons where things get busy and people put some extra time in—but then we encourage them to take some extra time off, too. We’re a product-led organization that takes our work-life balance seriously, so we all prioritize working hard and smart, but at a measured pace. We care deeply about what we do, but we also love our families and about 2,000 other things. We have perspective and, ultimately, we think it makes us—and our work—even better.

Flex Your Work Schedule

As a remote team, a lot of our work is done asynchronously—but we also love working together in real time. We try to schedule most meetings from 12-3 pm Eastern, Monday-Thursday. Outside of your meetings, we trust you to set your schedule by balancing your team’s needs with your own needs. You don’t need to ask for permission to take off early for an afternoon appointment, or be “active” on Slack if you’re working deeply on a project. We look at what you accomplish, not how long you’re in front of a computer.

Take Vacation (Seriously)

We want you to take vacation. In fact, we have a minimum vacation policy of three weeks per year. Five weeks feels about right (plus two extra weeks for our company-wide December Break). It’s important to get plenty of downtime and to get out and do something. We’ll look forward to seeing pictures of your adventures in our #office-wall Slack channel!

Meet the Team IRL

We love remote work around here, but we also love getting together in person. You’ll generally have the opportunity to meet with your YNAB teammates at least once a year, at a small-team work-focused meetup or at our biennial company retreat. At the YNAB retreat, we love to catch up on spreadsheets and powerpoints in a Best Western conference room. Just kidding. To give you an idea, we’ve been to Costa Rica, a gigantic cabin in the mountains, a ranch in Montana, Palm Springs, and most recently, Cape Cod. We work together, play together, and strengthen the bonds we’ve made as a team and company. At the end of each retreat, we feel energized, inspired, and excited to tackle the work ahead.

Up Your Game

We’re serious about helping you improve your craft, and will provide you with a professional development stipend each year. Think conferences, online courses, coaching, and dedicated time away from work to learn something new. We love to see our people grow!

Other Benefits

Our team is spread all over the world—mostly in the United States, but also in the UK, Canada, Germany, Brazil, Mexico, and several other countries. Everyone is eligible for our generous paid family leave, vacation, holidays, and sick time. 

Since you’re based in the United States, you’ll also be eligible for our health, dental, and vision insurance, where we cover 100% of the premium for you and your family. No need to check your vision, you read that right—100%. (Although if you did need to check your vision, NBD, we’ve got you covered!) 

We also have a Traditional and Roth 401(k) option, where YNAB matches your contributions up to six percent with immediate vesting. (Are you a personal finance junkie like our founder Jesse? He set up YNAB’s 401k to have the lowest fee structure possible, where all plan costs are paid by YNAB, not your retirement nest egg. The investment funds available are fantastic, passively-managed, ultra low-cost index funds. Not a PF junkie? Trust us, it’s awesome.) 

Competitive Compensation

At YNAB, we are dedicated to providing equitable, market-driven, and data-informed compensation, along with a competitive benefits package. The starting salary for this role will range from $85,000 – $110,000 USD annually. (This covers a wide range of possible experiences; think of it like a bell curve. Most candidates fall somewhere around the midpoint.) You’ll also be eligible for an annual raise and profit-sharing twice a year. When YNAB succeeds, so do you—that’s the idea.

A Few Final Tidbits

• Once you start, we DEMAND (in a friendly, ALL CAPS IS YELLING way) that you fill out your “Bucket List” spreadsheet with 50 items. We love to celebrate with you when you complete things on your bucket list!

• We’ll also ask you (and your manager, and your friends, and maybe even your mom) what some of your favorite things are—we’ve got a “birthdays and other gifts” category in our spending plan, and we’re adding you to it.

• We want you firing on all cylinders, so we’ll set you up with a shiny new computer and replace it every three years.

• Did we mention that YNAB makes a huge, positive difference in people’s lives? You may not think that matters much, but then a few months down the road, you’ll realize it’s made your job really, really enjoyable. Don’t underestimate this!

If this sounds like your ideal environment, read on because now we want to talk about you, and how you’ll play a big part in changing people’s lives.

Ultimately, your role is to be an enabler. You’ll help people in every department at YNAB determine the “right” questions to ask, define good measurable outcomes, and evaluate all the steps of an initiative cycle—from research and planning to post-launch evaluation. But the deeper goal isn’t to produce more analyses on request. It’s to build systems, definitions, and self-service paths that let people get to trustworthy answers.

You’ll also help the data team tackle a few key goals: strengthen our foundations; increase and evangelize data literacy; and shape what AI in data looks like at YNAB. With this in mind, your job will start out at about 60% foundational and operational work (think reliable tables, consistent metric definitions, the tooling that makes self-service trustworthy), and 40% strategic insight and opinionated recommendations. That ratio will shift more toward strategy as our foundations get stronger (thank you!).

You’re seen as a thought partner, not a service function. That’s because: 

• You don’t wait for questions to be asked, but instead proactively point teams toward where data indicates opportunity.

• You challenge the question before building the answer. When someone brings you a theory backed by a data point, your instinct is to test it, not confirm it. 

• You figure things out. You don’t need to know everything on day one, but you’re resourceful enough to get unstuck on your own, and self-aware enough to ask for help before you’re truly stuck. 

• You form a point of view. When you present an analysis, it comes with a recommendation, not just findings. You hold those recommendations with conviction but not ego; when new data changes the picture, you update your view and say so.

• You’re the first to flag when a question needs qualitative input, not another query.

• You have a bias toward action. A good-enough analysis shipped this week beats a perfect one delivered next month. You know when to keep digging and when to say “here’s what I know, here’s what I’d recommend, here’s what I’m still uncertain about” and let the team move.

Eva and Jason are going to so appreciate your help with:

• Strengthening our foundations.

• You own data quality end-to-end. This is a hands-on role; you’ll be in the data every day. 

• You’ll co-own the operational health of our data stack. That means Snowflake administration (permissions, cost monitoring, troubleshooting), dbt model development and maintenance, Fivetran/Artie pipeline monitoring, and dashboard building. 

• You find satisfaction in making systems reliable. Please be the person who fixes the data model so the next ten questions are easier to answer!

• You treat ad-hoc requests as a signal, not a task list. Recurring questions mean something’s missing, and you go find what it is and fix the root cause.

• Increasing data literacy.

• You have a knack for explaining complex topics so non-data folks leave the conversation more confident, not more confused.

• You meet people where they are. Some stakeholders are comfortable in Amplitude; some would love to learn; some need a Slack summary. Your job is to help them use data well, whatever “well” looks like for them.

• You’ll help us create self-service tooling with results we can trust. The goal is not to have wrong answers faster, but to enable people to answer their own questions without accidentally drawing the wrong conclusions.

• You give thoughtful feedback on data work across the company (dashboards, experiment analysis, peer dbt SQL code)—not to nitpick, but to support clarity, accuracy, and good practice.

• You’ll share your insights, wins, losses, and failures-to-learn-from (or even your spicy data hot takes!) openly. That’s how we build a culture of experimentation and learning.

• Shaping what AI in data looks like at YNAB.

• We don’t have it all figured out, and we want someone who’s eager to define this together: Where does AI generate the most value in data work, and where is human judgment worth protecting?

• You’re AI-fluent and genuinely excited about what it can do, without being a blind hype believer. You’ve used these tools enough to know where they shine and where they hallucinate, and you can explain both to teammates who are either skeptical or over-eager.

• Our foundations are visibly stronger than they were a year ago: metric definitions are clearer, key tables are more reliable, experiment frameworks are in place.

• The data stack runs day-to-day, even when one of us is on vacation. Issues get resolved before anyone outside of the data team notices them; dbt models are maintained and improved proactively. We hear about data issues from our monitoring, not from someone asking “why don’t we see numbers in Amplitude anymore?”.

• Data discussions focus on trade-offs and decisions, not data correctness.

• The ad-hoc request queue is visibly shorter because people are answering their own questions with tools and processes you built.

• You’ve proactively surfaced insights (that no one had realized they needed!) that informed a strategic decision.

• You can turn a vague business question into an appropriate analytical approach (not the fanciest one, the right one).

• You have experience influencing decisions, not just informing them. People are engaged and invested in the data stories you share—you care, so they do too.

• You’ve worked with enough messy data to have solid data quality intuition. You know when something smells off in a dataset, even when the numbers look plausible.

• You have enough technical foundation to catch when AI-generated SQL silently drops records or makes wrong assumptions about data structure.

• You use AI tools fluently to move faster, while owning the output and maintaining the judgment to know when it’s wrong. You see AI as a multiplier for the execution layer, which frees you to spend more time on the judgment layer: framing the right question, interpreting the results, making the recommendation.

• You treat data work as a craft. You’d read a teammate’s dbt PR carefully, share what you learned from a conference talk, and push back on your own analysis before anyone else gets the chance.

• You’re motivated by progress. You’d rather ship a good-enough analysis this week than a “perfect“ one next month.

• You create lightweight processes that help teams scale, and you know when a process has outlived its usefulness.

• You’re comfortable owning outcomes, not just deliverables, even when the path isn’t clear.

• You match the depth of your analysis to the weight of the decision. You’ll spend an extra hour validating a query when a big decision depends on it; you’ll ship the good-enough answer when it doesn’t.

Read a typical data analyst job description, and you’ll hear about people who are excited about numbers and charts, inherently curious, analytical, and persistent until they can explain any data anomaly—and they are not wrong! We hope that you’re all of those things. 

But: The best data stories draw people in and are easy to understand, so we also hope that you’re a great teacher and communicator of the “So what?” and “What now?”. And if you’re passionate about seeing the humans behind the numbers, increasing data literacy, using AI to do your job better, and you care deeply about the respectful usage of users’ private data? Well, that’s a whole list of reasons we’d love to hear from you.

Submit your application (including what’s listed below) by Sunday, May 10th at 11:59pm PT. Firm. It’s a real deadline. 

• A resume. If you don’t have an updated formal resume, that’s fine! An informal overview of your work history and education is all we’re looking for.

• A cover letter and answers to a few specific questions. This isn’t your typical cover letter—skip the fluff and formalities, and just help us get to know you. 

• On page 1: We’d love for you to tell us a bit about yourself, what drew you to work in data, why you’re interested in this role at YNAB, and why you think you’d be a great fit. 

• On page 2 onward: Please answer these three questions:

• 1. How have you honed your craft in data, and how do you see yourself continuing to develop your skills in the future? Feel free to share specific strategies, sources of information or inspiration, and/or your general approach. Please answer in 1-2 paragraphs.

• 2. Tell us about a time you pushed for something at work, but it didn’t happen. What did you do? How did it turn out? Please answer in no more than 3 paragraphs.

• 3. Imagine you’re our new Data Analyst (yay!) and one of our Product Managers sends you an excited Slack message: “Hey! I looked at the dashboard for the new money assignment feature we launched last month, and adoption is at 35%! That’s way above our 20% target. I want to share this with leadership. Can you help me pull the numbers together?”
  You look at the data and notice two things: First, the 35% adoption is cumulative. It counts everyone who’s tried the feature since launch. Weekly active use of the feature is closer to 15%, and it’s been trending down over the past two weeks. Second, most of the adoption is coming from long-time YNAB users (2+ years). New users are adopting at closer to 10%.
  Please draft a 1-2 paragraph reply to the Product Manager.

• If you meet our hard requirements and follow the application instructions, we promise a real human will review your materials. With that being said: Please be yourself! We want to get to know you, not AI.

• Keep an eye out for an email from @pinpoint.email titled Thank you for applying to YNAB! This confirms your application has been received. If you don’t see that email, we probably didn’t get your application—please try again. 

• If we can help with an accessibility need, email us at accommodations@ynab.com and indicate in the subject line that you’re applying for the Data Analyst role. (Please note that we can only respond to messages related to accommodations at this email.)

• Finally, please click here for an outline of what this hiring process will look like. It’s rigorous, but truthfully, people say it’s fun!

We look forward to hearing from you! 

P.S. If you’re not interested in this position right now, but know someone who might be, we’d appreciate you passing this along!

To apply: https://weworkremotely.com/remote-jobs/ynab-humbly-confident-data-analyst

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