Senior Manager, Data Science at Best Buy in Richfield, Minnesota

Job Description:

Best Buy is seeking two Senior Managers, Data Science to join the Data & Analytics Center of Excellence, supporting Labor Planning and the Physical Assets portfolio. The Senior Managers will design, develop, and deploy a wide variety of scientific solutions to improve Best Buy’s analytics approach for these two business areas. The Senior Managers will own a direct relationship with business stakeholders as trusted consultants and advisors. As trusted business advisors, these roles will develop recommendations, visualizations, dashboards, and presentations and engage in data sourcing, data forensics, data transformations, and data pipelining. Through a diverse assortment of data-driven mathematics these roles will be involved in demand forecasting, ad hoc statistical analytics, predictive modeling, optimization, and other quantitative studies. Additionally, these roles will be assist with the technical development of the software, hardware, and processes needed to bring solutions to life in the corporate environment and for our stores.

The Senior Manager, Data Science will:

• Lead technical efforts applying scientific methods and rigor to produce meaningful and value-added data insights and products to complex and very ambiguous problems. Lead processes with business partners and other members of the cross-functional team as necessary to clarify requirements and document results.


• Apply scientific methods to solve large real-world business problems based on completing an exhaustive exploration of the data and applying advanced statistical and algorithmic approaches to uncover key insights and patterns within the data that can be leveraged to drive real business value.


• Deliver data-driven solutions to complex problems with very high levels of ambiguity using both structured and unstructured data.


• Proactively hypothesize and identify significant areas of opportunity where machine learning could be applied to benefit the business leveraging all sources of data and advanced analytical techniques to validate opportunities.


• Present results of analyses to stakeholders and leadership in a manner that is interpretable.


• Lead discussions with technical and non-technical product team members to determine the feasibilities of recommended solutions. Collaborate with other engineers and product team members to implement and deploy scalable solutions.


• Set the technical direction and priorities to achieve project objectives.


• These roles are designated as People Leaders that will manage and develop direct reports.

• Lead the development of demand forecasting, ad hoc statistical analytics, predictive modeling, optimization, visualization and dashboarding for pools of labor in the stores, supply chain, and in-home or the Physical Asset portfolio


• Review current and past studies of Best Buy’s demand forecasting processes, allocation of labor pools, or physical assets. Identify key findings and recommend areas for future study


• Become a subject matter expert for Best Buy’s labor forecasting processes, and corresponding execution processes that supply labor to meet demand, or Best Buy’s physical asset portfolio


• 
  For the Physical Assets role, lead the Store Genome research. Identify the unique characteristics of each store, discover patterns among groups of stores, and build clusters useful for experimentation and analytics.


• Assess the performance of existing labor allocation models or various store formats and their effects on customer, employee, and financial metrics. Build a holistic understanding by identifying relationships, patterns, surpluses, shortages, and tradeoffs.


• Develop mathematical approaches to show the impacts of investments made in labor pools or physical assets and the corresponding effects of marginal dollars that are added and/or removed, capped and/or floored.


• Collect and categorize a backlog of inquiries from business stakeholders. Lead efforts in value targeting, business case development, and backlog grooming


• Partner with external consulting firms in periodic engagements, assist in bidirectional data transfers and knowledge transfers


• Build slides to explain study findings to layperson and executive audiences. Develop training materials for business laypersons and practicing professionals.


• Select applicable data science techniques for each business inquiry and execute the techniques


• Evaluate, select, and deploy software and hardware as needed to bring solutions to life, with an emphasis on interdepartmental reusability


• Navigate organizational and technological complexity to discover, source, trace, cleanse, and link disparate datasets


• Create organizational memory/double loop learning for Best Buy’s labor models or physical assets.

• 5 or more years’ experience in data science, data analysis, data mining or relevant similar business functions. Advanced degrees in relevant fields may be counted towards experience requirements.


• 2 or more years‘ experience with at least one data science/analytics programming language such as Python and/or R


• 2 or more years’ experience working with big data such as enterprise data warehouses, cloud databases, distributed data processing and/or distributed analytics


• 1 or more years’ experience leading data scientists, including providing work direction, coaching, and mentoring


• Strong understanding of at least one focus area of data science such as statistics, machine learning, design and analysis of experiments, operations research, and/or quantitative analysis


• Bachelor's degree in a highly quantitative field such as Computer Science, Engineering, Physics, Math, Operations Research

• 6-10 years hands-on data science experience (in addition to advanced degree)


• Master's degree or Ph.D. in a highly quantitative field such as Statistics, Math, Operations Research, and/or Physics


• Experience using high performance machine learning and/or data mining frameworks


• Experience building distributed data processing pipelines


• Ability to effectively communicate technical information to cross-functional team members


• Demonstrated ability to manage and develop direct reports