Data Scientist Lead – Measurement and Experimentation

Sobeys; Toronto; Hybrid; CAD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid work model

Disability accommodations

Job summary

Sobeys is seeking a Data Science Lead for Measurement and Experimentation in the Advanced Analytics team. You will guide a portfolio of measurement solutions across marketing, store, and space planning applications, including A/B testing and Bayesian measurement for personalization.

Join a cross-functional team translating business requirements into statistical KPIs, building robust ETLs, and deploying ML models in a scalable cloud environment. Hybrid work in Toronto is available.

Qualifications

• Master's or PhD in Statistics, Mathematics, CS or related field.
• 5+ years as a data scientist or similar with leadership experience.
• End-to-end development and productionization of measurement ETLs in cloud environments.
• Experience with Bayesian modelling, A/B and experimentation in retail or B2C.
• Strong Python and SQL data manipulation skills (PySpark).
• Familiarity with MLOps tools (MLflow, Airflow) is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Provide technical leadership for measurement solutions across marketing and promotion use cases.
• Lead data scientists to build measurement ETLs and scalable algorithms in cloud environments.
• Develop and sustain measurement methodologies for multiple experiment levels.
• Translate KPIs into statistical measures and oversee MLOps pipelines.
• Collaborate with BI to design clear dashboards and communicate metrics.

Education

Master's or PhD degree in Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science, or related technical field

Tools

Python (Pandas, PySpark)

Databricks

Snowflake

Azure Synapse

AWS SageMaker

MLflow

Airflow

PyMC/StatsModel/Numpyro

TensorFlow/PyTorch

Job description

Ready to Make an impact?

Data Scientist Lead – Measurement and Experimentation

Location: Sobeys COLAB Office (Toronto Downtown)

Team: Advanced Analytics

Overview:

The Advanced Analytics team at Sobeys operates on the frontlines of retail innovation. We are a multi-disciplinary team of data scientists, engineers, software developers, architects, and analysts who design, develop, and deploy high-impact, scalable measurement for AI/ML products and services that are fundamentally transforming how Sobeys and its family of banners interact with customers and operate their businesses. We leverage the latest cloud technology and advanced analytical techniques to connect the dots between customer behaviour and business operations and unearth the true drivers of customer engagement, sales growth, and profitability. Our work directly impacts the daily lives of millions of Canadian consumers and is a key pillar in our mission to become the #1 retail brand in Canada.

Here’s where you’ll be focusing:

What you’ll get to do in this role:

As the Data Science Lead - Measurement and Experimentation, you will provide technical leadership for a portfolio of measurement solutions covering a broad range of marketing, space productivity, and promotion planning use cases, including but not limited to A/B testing of stores for space optimization algorithm, and Bayesian measurement for marketing personalization program. You will partner with the Data Science, Business, Enterprise Data, Technology, Cybersecurity, Business Intelligence, and Engineering teams to translate measure and provide visibility into AI/ML solutions. You will work closely with the Data Science Director on measurement product direction and design decisions and oversee all technical aspects of the measurement solution for AI/ML applications, from design to deployment and sustainment. The successful candidate will be a self-directed, experienced applied data scientist who enjoys building advanced measurement ETLs from the ground up.

Key responsibilities include:

• Work directly with business stakeholders to translate business requirements and opportunities into statistical KPIs for measurement of AI/ML problems.
• Lead team of data scientists to build and manage statistical measurement ETLs for new AI/ML applications and continuously improve existing measurement algorithms in a scalable cloud development environment using Databricks; work in lockstep with the Engineering team to ensure proper workflow orchestration and automation across the full, end-to-end measurement ETLs.
• Own the development, implementation and sustainment of measurement and experimentation methodologies for AI/ML products across different levels of the business, including customer-level, product-level and store-level experiments (e.g., frequentist testing for stores, Bayesian test for customers in personalization program, and Markov chain multi-touch attribution modeling for retail media).
• Work closely with business stakeholders to translate measures of success and KPIs to statistical measures (e.g., incremental sales lift, contribution of certain media touchpoint to overall sales, and ROI) for all applications and use cases under your stewardship; partner with the Advanced Analytics Data Science teams on the development of AI/ML MLOPs pipelines and ensure measurement ETLs are developed in sync and reports to tracks various statistical metrics.
• Work closely with Business Intelligence (BI) teams in building, maintaining, and optimizing dashboards and find easy to understand messaging for advanced statistical metrics of various business stakeholders.
• Mentor and coach team by providing regular feedback and through code reviews and pair programming.
• Support production model governance processes and the development of robust quality controls for your algorithms.
• Work with peers across the Advanced Analytics team to drive MLOps, engineering, and coding best practices, global standards, and the build of common, reusable measurement components across the AA product portfolio.
• Stay up to date with best practices and latest advances in application of statistics, Bayesian statistics, and Markov chains in retail, and drive the adoption of the same across the team.
• Sobeys is committed to accommodating applicants with disabilities throughout the hiring process and will work with applicants requesting accommodation at any stage of this process.

#LI-Hybrid

What you should bring to the team:

• Master's or PhD degree in Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science, or other related technical fields.
• 5+ years of industry experience working as a data scientist or similar roles, with at least 2+ years of direct people management or team leadership experience.
• Significant experience in end-to-end development and productionization of measurement ETLs and experimentation methodologies in retail, B2C or other similar settings using Python in a cloud environment (e.g., Databricks, Snowflake, Azure Synapse, AWS SageMaker), including model deployment, monitoring, and scalability.
• Familiarity with MLflow, Airflow, and similar MLOps platforms is a plus.
• Experience developing and operationalizing Bayesian modelling and experimentation in retail or other B2C setting.
• Experience building and deploying Markov Chain models for attribution modeling in retail or other B2C settings.
• Experience in building and/or deploying large-scale measurement algorithms in marketing, space planning, promotion planning (e.g., A/B testing or Bayesian simulation) to measure AI/ML applications is highly desirable.
• Strong experience with data manipulation using PySpark and SQL.
• Extensive hands-on experience with statistical modeling techniques using Python – experience using packages such as StatsModel, Numpyro or PyMC is a big plus.
• Experience with distributed ML platforms using GPUs and how to optimize them in packages like JAX or TensorFlow or PyTorch is a significant asset.
• Strong leadership and mentoring skills, with a proven ability to guide a team of data scientists to achieve ambitious goals and foster a collaborative environment.
• Proven experience managing multiple stakeholders, concurrent workstreams, priorities and deadlines in a high pressure, fast-paced environment.
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to explain and present complex technical concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Sobeys is committed to accommodating applicants with disabilities throughout the hiring process and will work with applicants requesting accommodation at any stage of this process.