Decision Scientist

Belk; Charlotte (NC); On-site; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Belk is seeking a Decision Scientist to design and deploy Next Best Action models that optimize marketing actions across channels such as email, SMS, and push. You’ll develop propensity and lift models, collaborate with marketing tech teams, and apply experimentation and feature engineering to drive personalized customer engagement.

The role requires strong Python/R, SQL, and ML algorithm knowledge, plus experience in production deployments, data pipelines, and CRM-related data sources.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in a quantitative field.
• 2-4 years of applied data science or similar.
• 1-2 years building models in retail/marketing contexts; production deployment experience is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Design end-to-end NBA decision models for channel, promotion type, creative variant, and send timing at the individual customer level.
• Support reinforcement learning, bandit frameworks, and related techniques in NBA decisioning.
• Develop propensity and uplift models used as inputs to NBA decisioning.
• Measure lift from marketing interventions via customer-level models across channels.
• Collaborate with marketing technology teams to deploy models in real-time environments.

Skills

Python

R

SQL

ML algorithms

Reinforcement learning

A/B testing

Communication

Education

Bachelor’s Degree in Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Data Science, Economics, or related quantitative field

Tools

Snowflake

Databricks

Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Job description

The Decision Scientist will support the design, development, and deployment of Next Best Action (NBA) models that determine the optimal marketing action across channel, promotion, and creative. These models power decisioning across owned channels including email, SMS, and push, enabling personalized, data-driven customer engagement at scale.

This role sits at the intersection of marketing strategy and data science, and requires an ability to work collaboratively with marketing, technology, and merchandising partners.

Essential Functions

• Design and build end-to-end Next Best Action (NBA) decision models that optimize marketing channel, promotion type, creative variant, and send timing at the individual customer level
• Support or contribute to reinforcement learning, multi-armed bandit, or contextual bandit frameworks as part of the NBA decisioning engine, with opportunity to grow expertise in this area
• Develop propensity models (purchase, churn, reactivation, category affinity) that serve as inputs to the NBA decisioning engine
• Build and maintain customer-level response models measuring incremental lift from marketing interventions across email, SMS, and push
• Collaborate with marketing technology teams to deploy models into real-time or near-real-time decisioning environments (e.g., via API or CDP integration)

Marketing Optimization & Experimentation

• Design and analyze A/B and multivariate experiments to measure model performance and continuously refine decisioning logic
• Partner with campaign operations to translate model outputs into actionable audience segments, suppression lists, and treatment assignments
• Apply optimization approaches that balance short-term revenue goals with longer-term customer engagement and retention objectives
• Build holdout and incrementality testing infrastructure to ensure accurate measurement of model-driven lift

Customer Intelligence & Feature Engineering

• Mine transactional, behavioral, and engagement data to engineer predictive features at the customer level
• Build and maintain customer feature stores supporting NBA model inputs: recency, frequency, category affinities, channel responsiveness, and promotional sensitivity
• Integrate third-party data sources (demographic overlays, loyalty data) to enrich model inputs and improve prediction accuracy
• Develop deep understanding of Belk customer segments by loyalty tier, shopping occasion, and FOB affinity to ensure models reflect behavioral nuance

Analytics Engineering & Model Operations

• Write clean, well-documented code in Python and/or R for model development, feature engineering, and scoring workflows
• Build SQL-based data pipelines to extract, transform, and prepare modeling datasets from enterprise data platforms
• Establish model monitoring, drift detection, and retraining cadences to maintain model accuracy over time
• Document model methodology, assumptions, validation results, and performance benchmarks to support governance and reproducibility

Stakeholder Partnership & Communication

• Partner with marketing strategists and CRM leads to define decisioning use cases and prioritize the model development roadmap
• Translate complex model outputs and findings into clear business narratives for non-technical marketing and business stakeholders
• Contribute ideas and best practices within the Decision Science function, and collaborate effectively across analytics and marketing teams

Education

• Bachelor’s Degree in Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Data Science, Economics, or related quantitative field required.

Work Experience

• 2-4 years applied data science, quantitative analytics, or related work; hands‑on experience with predictive modeling in an academic or professional setting required.
• 1-2 years building models in a retail, e‑commerce, marketing, or related business context preferred.
• Experience deploying models into production environments; familiarity with CDP platforms (e.g., Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Adobe, Braze) a strong plus.

Knowledge, Skills & Abilities

• Expert‑level proficiency in Python and/or R for statistical modeling, machine learning, and data manipulation
• Deep knowledge of supervised and unsupervised ML algorithms: gradient boosting (XGBoost, LightGBM), neural networks, clustering, and survival models
• Awareness of or exposure to reinforcement learning, multi‑armed bandit, or contextual bandit approaches; willingness to develop deeper expertise
• Strong SQL skills for complex data extraction and feature engineering from large enterprise datasets
• Familiarity with cloud‑based data environments (Snowflake, Databricks) and interest in developing model deployment skills
• Proven ability to frame ambiguous business problems into structured analytical approaches and model designs
• Working knowledge of customer lifecycle dynamics and an interest in CRM and loyalty marketing applications
• Strong intuition for incrementality, experimental design, and the distinction between correlation and causal lift
• Exceptional ability to communicate complex quantitative concepts to non‑technical stakeholders, including marketing leadership
• Demonstrated experience influencing cross‑functional teams through data and analytical storytelling
• Ability to work collaboratively in a team environment and communicate analytical findings to non‑technical partners
• Ability to manage time and workload effectively with flexibility to shift priorities based on business need

Must be authorized to work in the U.S. without the need for employment‑based visa sponsorship now or in the future, this includes OPT. Belk will not sponsor applicants for U.S. work visa status for this opportunity (no sponsorship is available for H‑1B, L‑1, TN, O‑1, E‑3, H‑1B1, F‑1, J‑1, OPT, CPT or any other employment‑based visa).