---
title: 'Data Acquisition Lead at Profound'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/data-acquisition-lead-profound-new-york-42rar352cty1'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-11-03'
---

# Data Acquisition Lead at Profound

- **Company:** [Profound](https://feeny.ai/companies/profound)
- **Location:** New York, NY
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-10-23
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-11-03
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/profound/1f9e1d99-1d92-4cf2-bfed-45829b7595c7

## Job description

Profound is the fastest-growing AI marketing platform, used by 15% of the Fortune 500 including Comcast, Estée Lauder, and Walmart, and innovators like Ramp, MongoDB, and Figma. It is where marketing teams do the work: research, briefs, content, campaigns, reporting, all in one place, alongside agents that carry the load with them. Built on 2B+ real user prompts and growing, Profound’s data shows you what people ask AI and what the models say back. Profound's AI Marketer joins that data with deep context about our customers to find the opportunities worth acting on, and then puts agents to work: automating reporting, drafting content, auditing pages for readability, running competitive research. It measures what works and gets better every day. As our Data Acquisition Lead, you will own the sourcing, evaluation, and commercial management of our data sources. You will build a reliable supplier and partner portfolio across various data providers. You will partner closely with Engineering, which owns production integrations and data collection infrastructure, as well as Product, Partnerships, Finance, and Legal.

## What you'll do

- Find and qualify providers and partners against our coverage, quality, capacity, and cost requirements
- Structure vendor trials, run benchmarks using internal tooling, and analyze results by source, geography, and workload
- Compare effective costs across pricing models, including retries, failures, minimum commitments, and overages
- Negotiate pricing, service commitments, support arrangements, renewals, and exit terms
- Maintain qualified alternatives and identify overlapping infrastructure or correlated failure risks across suppliers
- Lead vendor performance reviews and recommend expansion, replacement, or changes in allocation
- Coordinate onboarding and sourcing documentation with Engineering, Finance, and Legal
- Own vendor contracts and spend, and keep a clear record of vendor status, pricing, and decisions
- Partner cross functionally to resolve provider issues quickly
- Help build and scale the data acquisition team as Profound grows

## Who you are

- 5+ years of hands-on experience with external data or web data providers and partners, on either the vendor or customer side (e.g. sourcing and managing providers, solutions engineering, or technical account management)
- Strong commercial judgment, with examples of negotiations and measurable operating improvements
- Familiarity with data contract terms such as DPAs, usage rights, and indemnification
- Ability to use SQL and/or Python to inspect results, run evaluations, and challenge vendor claims
- Practical understanding of various data provider types, web data APIs, various data collection schemes, and common failure modes
- Evidence of introducing a working alternative provider or improving coverage, reliability, or effective cost
- Experience with unique data sets is a plus
- Excited by the opportunity to own and shape a new function at an early stage
- Comfortable in a fast-moving culture with autonomy, trust, and room to grow
- Drawn to competitive compensation and meaningful equity

Location This is an on-site role based in our Union Square, NYC office, designed for builders who thrive on speed, iteration, and meaningful impact. We are happy to support visa sponsorship for qualified international candidates. For this role, the expected base salary range is $200,000 to $275,000. Profound's total compensation package is designed to be competitive and includes base salary, equity, and a full range of benefits and perks. Final compensation will depend on factors such as your skills, experience, qualifications, and location, and will be determined during the interview process. Our recruiting team will share more details about the full compensation package and benefits as you move through hiring. Note: All official communication from Profound will come from a @tryprofound.com email address. If you're contacted by anyone using a different domain, please disregard and report it as spam.

## About Profound

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Profound is the full-stack marketing platform that helps brands understand, analyze, and optimize their visibility across AI-driven answer engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series C, Unicorn)
- **Headquarters**: New York, New York, United States (also offices in San Francisco, London, and Buenos Aires)
- **Founded**: 2024
- **Founders**: James Cadwallader (CEO) and Dylan Babbs (CTO)

## Core Business
- **Primary industries**: AI marketing intelligence, Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), brand visibility analytics
- **Target customers**: B2B – enterprise marketing teams (e.g., Target, Walmart, Figma, MongoDB, Charlotte Tilbury, US Bank)
- **Mission**: “To build the best technology so businesses can understand and control how they appear in AI answers.”

## Products & Services
- **Answer Engine Insights**: Dashboard providing real-time visibility into how brands are mentioned and rated across ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, and other AI platforms.
- **Agent Analytics**: Tracks how a brand’s website is crawled and interpreted by major AI models.
- **Prompt Volumes**: Shows what millions of people are asking AI, enabling demand alignment.
- **Profound Agents**: Autonomous AI workers that execute marketing functions (content creation, PR, brand sentiment, SEO/AEO) directly within the platform.
- **Profound Ecosystem**: Includes training, certification, an agency marketplace, and Profound University for marketers.
- **Integrations**: HubSpot, Google Workspace, Gamma, Parallel AI, Vercel (with more being added continuously).

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: $1 billion (unicorn as of Series C, February 2026)
- **Key Metric**: Total funding raised $154.5 million across four rounds; $96M Series C led by Lightspeed Venture Partners (Feb 2026)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Lightspeed Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins, Evantic, Saga Ventures, South Park Commons
- **Growth Signals**: 
  - 1B+ prompts analyzed daily, 30B+ citations analyzed daily
  - 1800+ customers worldwide
  - 169 employees (monthly headcount growth of +15.1%)
  - 88 open positions
  - Global footprint in 6 countries (US, UK, Argentina, India, Canada, Brazil)

## Competitive Advantages
- **First-mover advantage** in the AI visibility / AEO category, with proprietary data on how AI models crawl and represent brands.
- **Integrated platform** that moves from insight (analytics) to execution (Agents) in one system, replacing fragmented toolchains.
- **Strong talent pool**: early hires from Yext, 6sense, Amazon, Attentive, and consulting firms.
- **Rapid scaling**: raised from Seed to Series C and reached unicorn status in 18 months.

## Strategic Focus
- **Platform expansion**: Building out the Profound Ecosystem (training, certification, agency marketplace) to create a new category of “Marketing Engineer.”
- **Global reach**: Growing engineering and go-to-market teams across NYC, SF, London, and Buenos Aires.
- **Product depth**: Enhancing Agents with deeper automation while keeping humans in control of strategy.
- **Partnerships & integrations**: Deepening ties with major marketing and productivity tools.

## Why Work Here
- **Compensation**: Strong base salary plus significant equity in a well-funded unicorn.
- **Culture**: High-context, direct communication with a bias for action; “merit-driven, not tenure-driven” career acceleration.
- **Work model**: In-office presence required in NYC, SF, London, or Buenos Aires; daily catered meals, late-night Uber reimbursement, fitness stipend, and flexible time off.
- **Engineering focus**: Key roles include Agent Engineer, AI/ML Engineer, Design Engineer, Forward Deployed Engineer – competing for AI talent against companies like OpenAI and Anthropic.
- **Growth**: Rapid scaling environment with visible impact; opportunity to define a new category.

## Sources
1. [tryprofound.com](https://www.tryprofound.com/)
2. [tryprofound.com/careers](https://www.tryprofound.com/careers)
3. [LinkedIn / Profound](https://www.linkedin.com/company/tryprofound)
4. [Fortune – Exclusive: Profound raises $96M](https://fortune.com/2026/02/24/exclusive-as-ai-threatens-search-profound-raises-96-million-to-help-brands-stay-visible/)
5. [tryprofound.com/blog – Series C announcement](https://www.tryprofound.com/blog/profound-raises-96m-series-c)

## Other roles at Profound

- [Member of Technical Staff, Evals and Post-Training](https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-evals-and-post-training-profound-new-york-9vbs0t0km12d) — New York, NY
- [Strategic Partnerships Associate](https://feeny.ai/job/strategic-partnerships-associate-profound-new-york-mbchy5kbs94x) — New York, NY
- [Marketing Engineer, Discoverability](https://feeny.ai/job/marketing-engineer-discoverability-profound-new-york-qvjbgz7rk7fh) — New York, NY
- [Member of Technical Staff, Engineering Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-engineering-manager-profound-new-york-ekevm23z3t9x) — New York, NY
- [Manager, Recruiting Operations](https://feeny.ai/job/manager-recruiting-operations-profound-new-york-za4sfg37r2qn) — New York, NY
- [G&A Recruiter](https://feeny.ai/job/g-a-recruiter-profound-new-york-b3da8brjc24m) — New York, NY
- [Office Operations Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/office-operations-manager-profound-london-psgjhmp9f2fh) — London, United Kingdom
- [Head of Design](https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-design-profound-new-york-st0vbetehe8w) — New York, NY
- [GTM Enablement Program Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/gtm-enablement-program-manager-profound-new-york-b49k9ctd6jgq) — New York, NY
- [Manager, Forward Deployed Marketing Engineers](https://feeny.ai/job/manager-forward-deployed-marketing-engineers-profound-new-york-s3kp56tmky1m) — New York, NY