Lead Data Scientist - Assortment & Space Planning

With a career at The Home Depot, you can be yourself and also be part of something bigger.

Position Purpose:

We are transforming how merchandising decisions are made through AI-powered solutions and automation. This Lead Data Scientist plays a key role in designing and building state-of-the-art GenAI and Agentic AI Systems that enables autonomous decision recommendations. The position focuses on orchestrating LLMs with existing foundational models to deliver adaptive, learning decision systems that increase efficiency and improve customer experience.

This role leads the end-to-end implementation of agentic AI initiatives, from architecture design and experimentation through evaluation and ongoing governance in production.  The Lead Data Scientist partners closely with data science teams, product managers, software engineers, and business stakeholders to embed foundational science models into agentic workflows, design AI orchestration platforms, and promote scalable services frameworks in production. The role establishes best practices and internal standards for Agentic AI development, testing, and monitoring, communicates technical and business insights to diverse audiences, and provides strategic technical leadership across cross-functional teams.

Key Responsibilities:

• 30% Solution Development - Utilize expertise when designing and developing algorithms and models to use against large datasets to create business insights; Make appropriate selection, utilization and interpretation of advanced analytics methodologies; Effectively communicate insights and recommendations to both technical and non-technical leaders and business customers/partners; Clearly communicate impacts of recommendations to drive alignment and appropriate implementation
• 25% Project Management & Team Support - Lead and manage large and complex projects and teams; Provide direction on prioritization of work and ensure quality of work; Provide mentoring and coaching to more junior roles to support their technical competencies; Collaborate with managers and team in the distribution of workload and resources; Support recruiting and hiring efforts for the team; Serve as a technical subject matter expert (SME) for one or more data science methods, both predictive and prescriptive; Lead data science communities across several business units
• 20% Business Collaboration - Leverage extensive business knowledge into solution approach; Effectively develop trust and collaboration with internal customers and cross-functional teams; Provide technical education on advanced analytics to data science community; Partner with IT to understand potential for new tools and ways to maintain technical agility for data science; Actively seek out new business opportunities to leverage data science as a competitive advantage
• 25% Technical Exploration & Development - Seek further knowledge on key developments within data science by attending conferences and publishing papers; Participate in the continuous improvement of data science and analytics by developing replicable solutions (for example, codified data products, project documentation, process flowcharts) to ensure solutions are leveraged for future projects; Define best practices and develop clear vision for data analysis and model productionalization; Ownership of library of reusable algorithms for future use, ensure developed code/models are documented; Develop mastery in one or more prescriptive modeling techniques, like optimization, computer vision, recommendation, search or NLP

Direct Manager/Direct Reports:

• This position typically reports to manager or above
• This position has 0 Direct Reports and leads/manages projects

Travel Requirements:

• Typically requires overnight travel less than 10% of the time.

Physical Requirements:

• Most of the time is spent sitting in a comfortable position and there is frequent opportunity to move about. On rare occasions there may be a need to move or lift light articles.

Working Conditions:

• Located in a comfortable indoor area. Any unpleasant conditions would be infrequent and not objectionable.

Minimum Qualifications:

• Must be eighteen years of age or older.
• Must be legally permitted to work in the United States.
• Demonstrated expertise in predictive modeling, data mining and data analysis
• Demonstrated expertise utilizing statistical techniques to identify key insights that help solve business problems

Preferred Qualifications:

• 10+ years of combined AI engineering experience or equivalent in software engineering or ML engineering.
• 2+ years of experience developing/deploying GenAI or LLM-driven automated systems, and Ag