Machine Learning Data Scientist - Inventory Algorithms

About the Team

At Stitch Fix, our data science team combines machine learning with expert human judgment to generate innovative recommendations and insights that transform the way our clients discover what they love. We believe in a curiosity-driven data science culture where members have autonomy to deliver impact through end-to-end, full-stack product development and ownership. The diversity of the problems that we work on, and the data-rich environment of our business, make it possible, even essential, to bring the tools of multiple disciplines to bear on our hardest problems. We are looking for data scientists and leaders to join us as we revolutionize retail.

Several opportunities to join Algorithms exist over several teams. Teams hiring today include:

• The Logistics Algorithms team helps the business put the right things, in the right places, and at the right times in order to delight our clients and efficiently operate the business. Team members are owners of the health and efficiency of our fulfillment network, ensuring our clients can find the fits and styles they love. Alongside partnerships in merchandise planning, finance, and operations, we build tools to optimally manage the ingestion and circulation of merch, and power decision frameworks that help the business understand impacts through leveraging data insights in how inventory can work best to support the client journey.
• The Global Optimization team is connecting the dots for our clients and inventory. We seek to ensure that Stitch Fix’s systems are operating at their global optimum rather than at local optima. The team owns distribution of inventory among clients so that the outcomes for all clients are simultaneously considered given inventory constraints. We also own the optimization engine that will power making several critical decisions based on client demand, for example merchandise buying and allocation. We partner with Product Managers, Stylists, Merchandise Planners & Buyers as well as other Algorithm teams to build central tools that cut across organizational and functional boundaries of the company.

About the Role

As a Data Scientist – Inventory at Stitch Fix, you will design, implement, and validate improvements to the way our inventory surfaces to clients, improving how we match our limited assortment of available inventory to our client demand. 

Potential projects include:

• Managing the freshness and quality of inventory through optimizing the ingestion of new merchandise into our network 
• Identify and support opportunities to increase the velocity and visibility of our merch to increase the work our inventory does as we own it
• Improve optimization engine that bridges client demand to inventory
• Identify ways to more efficiently use our existing inventory

Optimizing our inventory has considerable opportunity for impact at Stitch Fix, by combining a deep focus on ensuring a client-right approach to inventory management with smart, active processes to increase business efficiency and unit margin.

You're excited about this opportunity because you will…

• Learn or grow your understanding of optimizations, systems design, and thinking in tradeoffs in the domain of operations research
• Build key relationships with multiple stakeholders in product and engineering, and with business leaders relying on your support to manage critical business functions
• Solution at high speed with a small, agile team of coworkers to produce outsized impact on the business
• Have the autonomy to identify unaddressed problems in the business as well as offer new, improved solutions to existing challenges
• Be exposed to a wide-open field of opportunity for impact with plenty of challenges to make your own
• Work in concert with and learn from a large, diverse, and world-class Algorithms team towards the common goal of transforming the way people find what they love.

We’re excited about you because…

• You have experience delivering software products in a production environment, preferably in python, ruby, or go
• You’re comfortable with SQL and with exploring data
• You have an understanding of statistical principles and how to apply them to data and experimental results, and can communicate derived insights to stakeholders to drive action 
• You drive for resiliency. You take a principled approach to complexity, and can make smart bets on where to invest time and system burden for maximum business impact
• You’re curious about what’s happening outside your immediate sphere and how you can leverage insights elsewhere inside the domains you own
• You’re happiest as a team player, able to balance time against multiple systems and work streams with d