Senior Technical Analyst, Forecasting Analytics

Location: Boston, MA (Hybrid - 3 days in office / 2 days remote).  
Start date: Immediately

Wayfair does not provide relocation for this role

Professional Python & SQL experience required

Who we are: 

The Planning and Inventory Management (PIM) team at Wayfair ensures that our best items are available for purchase while enabling Wayfair and our supplier partners to get the most out of their investments in inventory. In doing so, we are building an integrated approach to drive high availability across CastleGate (Wayfair’s proprietary logistics and fulfillment platform), Physical Retail, and dropship. This approach balances high turns, strong penetration and optimal positioning to enable reliable sales predictions for our suppliers’ demand and supply planning. The Demand Planning & Analytics (DP&A) team sits at the heart of this mission, providing the analytics horsepower behind our demand and supply planning and inventory management functions.

Job Overview:

Demand Planning & Analytics team seeks a self-starting, impact oriented Senior Analyst to design analytical frameworks, build model solutions, and deliver breakthroughs that will close key inventory management and/or forecasting performance gaps.  Example projects include developing a component breakdown framework to explain the key factors affecting the forecast (e.g.macro trends, out of stock rates, etc), unpacking inventory turns performance to inform the business on what it should do to best drive performance and achieve high ROI, and developing a simulation framework to enable users to see how their inventory forecast would change if they pulled certain “demand levers” (e.g. lowering price, getting faster shipping, etc).You will leverage rigorous analytical techniques, hypothesis-based strategic thinking, a customer focused mindset, and effective collaboration to develop insights into what we and our suppliers can do to secure positive outcomes. The successful candidate will be experienced in taking a highly complex data set and presenting clear and simple insights to the end user in a way that they will understand.

What You’ll Do: 

• Partner with internal teams (analytics, data science, engineering, operations, etc) to develop novel analytical frameworks and statistically analyze raw and curated inventory, pricing, merchandising, forecasting, and other relational datasets
• Develop insights, identify root causes and trends tied to sub-optimal inventory health, forecasting, process or technology improvement opportunities, and implement solutions to mitigate against those causes
• Enable suppliers to understand the “why” behind our demand forecasts and inventory replenishment recommendations and the opportunities to help drive business performance in Castlegate
• Be a strategic leader in defining the key pain points that users have when trying to understand forecasts or inventory positioning and management strategy; Design innovative solutions to deliver powerful insights by bridging the gap between complex data and easy to digest visualizations
• Establish data structures and artifacts that enable scalability in the processes and tools to monitor CastleGate inventory and/or forecast performance across key KPIs (turns, availability, penetration, positioning, DWAPE/MAPE, forecast bias) and allow for adjacent teams to consume that data
• Develop prototype solutions in Google Data Studio including end-to-end development of backend, analytics frameworks or models, and front end dashboards

Who You Are:

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent combination of education, training, and experience in a quantitative or technical field of study
• Experience in an analytics, business intelligence, data science or engineering role performing quantitative analysis
• ​​Highly collaborative, open minded with a “customer first” attitude; able to deliver net-optimal outcomes across teams and competing priorities
• Exceptional analytics skill set, including a high degree of comfort / expertise with using SQL, Google Cloud Platform, or other relational database technologies on a day-to-day basis with proven track record of insight development leading to action
• Professional experience with statistical programming or scripting languages (Python, R, etc.) 
• High attention to detail with ability to appropriately manage and prioritize projects and tasks appropriately that leads to results
• Knowledge of leading trends and best practices in Business Intelligence and Data Visualization
• Proficiency with data visualization tools like Looker, Tableau, or Google Data Studio is a plus
• Extensive experience synthesizing insights using Data Analysis Tools i.e. Ex