Data Scientist

About the Role

Merrowfield & Sons is hiring a full-time, permanent Data Scientist to join its Commercial Insights division, reporting into the Chief Commercial Officer’s organization. Based in Manchester, United Kingdom, this hybrid role requires three days per week in the office and two days working from home.

The Commercial Insights team was formed in 2024 to consolidate reporting and modelling across the company’s four retail banners. As the team moves from setup into delivering measurable commercial value, this role will focus on building data science solutions that inform decision-making across a large, multi-brand retail business operating approximately 420 stores across the UK and Ireland, alongside a significant e-commerce presence.

The Data Scientist will report to the Head of Commercial Analytics and work alongside three analysts, one data engineer, and two business-partnered insights managers. This is a broad role with meaningful exposure to commercially important problems and senior stakeholders.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead evaluation, benchmarking, and recommendation work for the company’s demand forecasting approach, including proposing either incremental improvements or a replacement to the current legacy system.
• Develop forecasting models that support ordering decisions across approximately 420 stores.
• Build customer lifetime value and propensity models for a loyalty base of approximately 9 million active members.
• Support more sophisticated customer segmentation through predictive and statistical modelling.
• Design and evaluate assortment and pricing experiments across stores, including A/B testing and multi-armed bandit approaches.
• Address complex experimental design considerations such as contamination, seasonality, and store-cluster design.
• Deliver ad hoc modelling and analytical support for high-priority commercial questions raised by senior leadership, including the Chief Commercial Officer.
• Communicate analytical findings clearly to business stakeholders and help translate model outputs into commercially relevant decisions.
• Work effectively with large-scale datasets, including fact tables containing tens of billions of rows.
• Contribute within a modern analytics environment that includes Snowflake, dbt, Power BI, Databricks notebooks, MLflow, and Azure DevOps.

Required Qualifications

• At least 4 years of experience working as a Data Scientist.
• Strong grounding in statistics, with the ability to select and defend appropriate modelling approaches such as Bayesian models, generalized linear models, and tree-based ensembles.
• Strong Python capability, including experience with pandas, scikit-learn, and statsmodels, as well as experience with at least one of the following: PyMC, Stan, LightGBM, or XGBoost.
• Strong SQL skills and experience working with very large datasets.
• Experience owning a model in production for at least 12 months, including understanding of model drift, retraining, and monitoring.
• Ability to communicate effectively with commercial stakeholders and connect analytical work to business performance and decision-making.
• Strong written communication skills, including the ability to produce clear memos for stakeholders beyond the immediate team.
• Comfort working in an environment where data maturity varies and where business stakeholders may not have technical backgrounds.
• A resilient, curious approach to working with complex, imperfect, or legacy data and systems.
• Experience using Azure DevOps for version control.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in retail, CPG, e-commerce, or travel.
• Experience with econometric causal inference methods such as difference-in-differences or synthetic control.
• Deep domain familiarity with retail forecasting.
• Familiarity with forecasting competitions such as M5 or M6.
• Familiarity with dbt.
• Exposure to MLOps tooling and practices.

What We Offer

• Base salary of £65,000 to £85,000, depending on experience.
• Annual company bonus scheme with a 10% target, paid against group profit.
• 25 days of holiday, plus 8 bank holidays and an additional day for the employee’s birthday.
• Pension with 7% employer contribution via salary sacrifice.
• 15% colleague discount across all four brand banners.
• Private medical cover through Vitality.
• Season ticket loan and cycle-to-work scheme.
• Annual professional body subscription support up to £500.
• Hybrid working with three days in the Manchester headquarters and two days from home.
• A modern, recently refurbished headquarters in Salford near Manchester city centre with good transport links.
• An inclusive employer committed to welcoming applications from all backgrounds and making reasonable adjustments to the interview process.