Advanced Analytics Lead - Forecasting Algorithms

Location: Boston, MA

Who we are: Forecasting Algorithms is a team of problem solvers and innovators that creates global inventory forecasts for over 3 million items each month. It’s mission is to produce data artifacts, decision frameworks and analytical tools that drive efficient trade-offs between product availability, delivery speed and operating cost across Wayfair globally, using best-in-class machine learning, economics and statistics based approaches. In 2020 we rapidly adapted to the impact of Covid-19 and designed new ways to model demand in the face of a highly complex macro environment, and supported new models with in depth analytics for hundreds of downstream users to consume. We continue innovating every day by fostering a collaborative environment and an ownership culture. 

Job Overview: Forecasting Algorithms is seeking an Advanced Analytics Lead to own an end to end analytics workstream that includes designing data warehouses, developing performance metrics and evaluation frameworks, building front end dashboards, and influencing data science roadmaps. This role will work closely with internal data science and analytics teams to create compelling narratives on emerging trends, identify opportunities for model enhancements, and drive solutions. The successful candidate is able to unpack ambiguous problems and identify root causes, is bold and open minded in search of new metrics and analytical frameworks, and can communicate complex information in a clear way.  

Primary Responsibilities: 

• Generate business insights by analyzing massive forecast data sets with over 60M new forecasts generated every month. Evolve and maintain a data warehouse to support analytics, and collaborate with the forecasting team to ensure best practices when analyzing data. 
• Define forecast accuracy measurement frameworks that identify where forecasts are good and where they need improvement across key cuts of the catalog like business line, data density, age, etc. 
• Create component breakdowns that highlight the key factors affecting forecast accuracy (e.g. business strategy changes, forward looking inputs, macro effects, data density, etc) and showcase the opportunity size of enhancement areas.
• Take a leadership role in scoping improvement areas and partnering with Data Science to influence model enhancement roadmaps.
• Bring structured approach to ambiguous problems, independently identifying what analytical approach is best suited to answer the question at hand. Make appropriate tradeoffs and pivot as necessary considering risks and interdependencies.
• Conduct analysis with a hypothesis driven focus, pulling data from a variety of sources or conducting tests to validate impact on business outcomes.
• Build views into production dashboards (Google Cloud Platform).

What You’ll Need:

• Bachelor’s degree in Statistics, Economics, Mathematics, Computer Science, or other concentrations with heavy quantitative focus and strong academic record
• 5+ years of post bachelor’s work experience in a quantitative field (e.g. business analytics, technology, startup, and/or other roles with heavy analytical emphasis  
• Strong SQL skills; Proficiency in Python or R
• Proficiency in building visualizations via Tableau / Looker / Google Data Studio, etc.
• Ownership mindset and the ability to ask the right questions that moves our work, the team, and the business forward
• Strong critical thinking and communication skills - ability to break down and clearly communicate complex ideas