Senior Data Scientist at Best Buy in Richfield, Minnesota

Job Description:

Best Buy is seeking two Senior Data Scientists to join the Data & Analytics Center of Excellence. The Senior Data Scientists will design, develop, and deploy a wide variety of scientific solutions to improve Best Buy’s portfolio of physical assets or labor planning. The Senior Data Scientists will assist in the design, develop, and deploy a wide variety of scientific solutions to improve Best Buy’s approach analytics approach for these two business areas. The Senior Data Scientists will have 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 assist with the technical development of the software, hardware, and processes needed to bring solutions to life in the corporate environment and for Best Buy stores.

The Senior Data Scientists will:

• Apply scientific methods and rigor to produce meaningful and value-added data insights and products to unclear and ambiguous problems.


• Interact with business partners and other members of the cross-functional team as necessary to clarify requirements and document results.


• Apply scientific methods to solve significant real-world business problems based on completing an 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 difficult problems with high levels of ambiguity using both structured and unstructured data.


• Independently identify potential areas of opportunity where machine learning could be applied to benefit the business and mine large structured and unstructured data appropriately to glean actionable insights and to make recommendations on how the data can be used to help solve ambiguous business problems.


• Present the results of any analyses in a manner that is interpretable and layout the technical approach for the machine learning product design to the team and leadership.


• Independently contribute to 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.


• These roles are designated as individual contributors with no direct people management responsibilities.

• Lead the development of demand forecasting, ad hoc statistical analytics, predictive modeling, optimization, visualization and dashboarding for Best Buy’s portfolio of physical assets or labor planning. Enable self-service by establishing standard patterns


• Review current and past studies of Best Buy’s physical assets or labor planning. Identify key findings and recommend areas for future study


• Become a subject matter expert on the topic of Best Buy’s physical asset portfolio or labor planning


• Assess the performance of various store formats or labor allocation models 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 physical assets or labor pools 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. Assist in value targeting, business case development, and backlog grooming


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


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


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


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


• Evaluate, select, and deploy software and hardware as needed to improve Best Buy’s portfolio of physical assets or labor planning


• Create organizational memory and double-loop learning for Best Buy’s physical assets or labor planning

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


• 1 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 and fluency with at least one data science/analytics programming language such as Python and/or R


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


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

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


• 3 or more years of hands-on data science experience (in addition to advanced degree)


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


• Experience building distributed data processing pipelines