Lead Data Scientist, Demand — Equity & Growth

Farmer's Fridge; Chicago (IL); On-site; USD 160,000 - 170,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, and vision insurance

401(k) with company match

Paid time off including vacation, sick

Paid sabbatical after 5 years

Employee discounts

Employee Assistance Program (EAP)

Job summary

Farmer’s Fridge is seeking a Lead Data Scientist, Demand, to own the forecasting models powering fridge and retail stock decisions. You will maintain and improve production models and expand forecasting to company-wide volume and revenue as the team matures.

You’ll work closely with the Lead Decision Scientist, Data Engineering, and the demand planning team to translate rules into predictive models and monitor business impact.

Qualifications

• 4-8 years building and maintaining forecasting or predictive models in production.
• Deep demand forecasting experience: time series, hierarchical, or ML-based methods.
• Comfort with count data and intermittent demand.
• Experience correcting for censored demand from stockouts and understanding why it matters.
• Strong Python and SQL; experience with Snowflake or similar cloud warehouse.
• Rigor in backtesting and experiment design; ability to prove model changes helped.
• Track record of owning model work end to end—from problem framing to production and monitoring.
• Ability to explain forecast uncertainty and tradeoffs to planners and operators.

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end fridge and retail demand forecasts: data, features, model, validation, and production.
• Build forecasts that maximize contribution margin; monitor sell-through, unsolds, and stockouts.
• Maintain and improve models in production and rebuild when better approaches pay off.
• Forecast at item, location, and day level across 2,000+ fridges and partner stores.
• Model challenges like stockouts, short shelf life, new fridges, and promotions.
• Produce probabilistic forecasts to support optimization decisions.
• Partner with Lead Decision Scientist on forecast outputs needed by the solver.
• Build backtesting and monitoring with value-focused metrics (sell-through, waste).
• Run standing model scorecards with Channel Strategy and Demand Planning.
• Collaborate with Data Engineering to run models in production pipelines (Snowflake, dbt, Dagster).
• Explain model expectations to demand planning, supply chain, and operations.

Skills

Forecasting in production

Python

SQL

Demand planning

Communications

Tools

Snowflake

dbt

Dagster

Job description

Farmer’s Fridge is seeking a Lead Data Scientist, Demand, to own the forecasting models powering fridge and retail stock decisions. You will maintain and improve production models and expand forecasting to company-wide volume and revenue as the team matures.

You’ll work closely with the Lead Decision Scientist, Data Engineering, and the demand planning team to translate rules into predictive models and monitor business impact.