Senior Manager, Data Science

About The Company
Essor, where brands take flight. We find digital challenger brands and supercharge them into iconic global legends that consumers love. As a next-generation consumer products platform, we leverage technology, industry expertise, and strategic collaborations to ignite growth and launch brands beyond expectations.

Essor's brand portfolio today includes a broad range of rapidly growing health & wellness and lifestyle brands like Boka, ZitSticka, Puracy, OTOTO Design, FreshCap, Iron Flask, Fullstar, NumNum, Key Nutrients, and Viking Revolution that are sold on Amazon, Direct to Consumer channels, and through national retailers like Target, CVS, and Walmart.

About The Role
As a Senior Manager of Operations Intelligence, you'll own the data-driven forecasting process including, monthly Machine Learning forecast generation and weekly overrides ingestion while driving new enhancements to our inventory management stack (allocation, replenishment, supply planning, shipment planning & consolidation). You'll also own data reliability and the infrastructure behind it, including flags & alerts, testing, and governance so operators can trust the numbers. You will also spearhead automation initiatives powered by the latest generative AI—LLM copilots and agentic workflows—to remove repetitive work, accelerate planning cycles, and deliver measurable ROI with strong guardrails and governance.

The role combines scientific rigor, product thinking, and delivery discipline, and partners deeply with S&OP/Inventory leaders, and Engineering to drive company-wide productivity, efficiency, and cost savings.

About The Team
The Operations Intelligence team, part of the Global Supply Chain team, turns data into day-to-day decisions for Supply Chain. We build and run the platforms that analysts, planners, and Inventory teams use to set forecasts, allocate inventory, plan replenishment and supply, and orchestrate shipments and consolidations. Our remit spans forecasting + inventory optimization and the Ops Intelligence toolkit—dashboards, self-serve analytics, and exception management.

What you will do:

• Forecasting & MLOps

• Run monthly forecast generation and weekly ingestion with clear SLAs and guardrails.

• Maintain and iterate models (feature engineering, retraining cadence, champion/challenger) and introduce new models when they beat baselines on accuracy and stability.

• Implement practical MLOps: versioning, reproducibility, model registry, monitoring/alerting, and rollback.

• Inventory Management & Optimization

• Upkeep and enhancements of inventory planning tools: allocation, replenishment, supply planning, shipment planning & container consolidation.

• Maintain the Ops Intelligence platform (dashboards, self-serve tools, exception management) used by supply chain operators and brand managers.

• Own data reliability & infostructure: define data contracts, quality SLAs, validation tests, anomaly/threshold flags & alerts, lineage, documentation, and change management.

• Stakeholder Partnership & Strategy (S&OP, Inventory, Engineering, Product)

• Serve as the primary point of contact for S&OP and Inventory leaders on tooling, reporting, and ad-hoc analytics requests.

• Run structured intake, scope trade-offs, set expectations, and communicate status and outcomes crisply.
• Work closely with Engineering/Data to unlock new data sources, shape warehouse schemas/data contracts, and ensure the team has the tools/environments to deliver reliably at scale.

• Collaborate with Product/Engineering to productionize analytics and models into maintainable, supportable systems.

• Automation with LLMs & Agentic AI

• Lead an automation program to remove manual, repetitive planner work using LLM copilots and agentic patterns (tool use/function calling, retrieval/RAG, multi-step orchestration, human-in-the-loop).

• Stand up safety & governance (guardrails, evaluations, monitoring), and quantify ROI (hours saved, cycle-time reduction, decision quality). Pilot fast, scale what works.

• Agile Delivery & Sprint Leadership

• Partner with the Director of Operations Intelligence to translate business goals into a sequenced roadmap tied to measurable outcomes (service level, turns, DOH, working capital, accuracy, cycle-time).

• Own bi-weekly sprints: backlog grooming, prioritization, acceptance criteria, velocity tracking, risk management, and on-time delivery against stakeholder commitments.

• Maintain transparent comms: roadmaps, burndowns, release notes, and post-release feedback loops.

• Scientific Frameworking & Code Quality (Hands-On)

• Lead methodology/design (problem framing, experiment design, offline/online evaluation).

• Perform code reviews, enforce engineering standards, and troubleshoot complex data/model issues.

• Turn analytical outputs into clear narratives and decision-ready recommendations.

• People Leadership

• Manage two direct reports: set goals & growth plans, provide ongoing coaching, run effective 1:1s, and lead performance reviews.

• Foster a high-trust, inclusive environment with clear expectations, timely feedback, and recognition.
• Support hiring/onboarding and create clear career pathways (skills matrices, stretch projects, mentorship).

Who you are:

• Bachelor's or Master's in a quantitative field (Data Science, Statistics, OR, CS, Engineering, Economics, or similar).
• Experience in applied data science/analytics with experience leading people or projects.
• Experience building inventory optimization and time-series forecasting solutions used in operations.
• Proficiency in Python (pandas, scikit-learn/forecasting libs), SQL, and BI/visualization (e.g., Tableau/Power BI).
• Demonstrated ownership of data quality/reliability (tests, SLAs, alerting) and productionized analytics.

• Nice to Have:

• Domain experience in CPG/Retail/Supply Chain and S&OP processes.

• MLOps tooling exposure (registry, CI/CD, model monitoring) and data reliability frameworks.
• Familiarity with LLM/agent frameworks and safe deployment at work (guardrails, evals).
• Background collaborating with Engineering/Product to ship analytics as products.

We are seeking for people who:

• Are owners.
• Are continually raising the bar.
• Are sincerely open-minded, and are willing to examine their strongest convictions with humility.
• Nurture and embrace differing perspectives to make better decisions.

What's in it for you?

• A supportive, diverse and global team with a growth mindset.
• A scaling company with great industry professionals.
• A flexible (hybrid) working environment.
• Great opportunities to get involved with exciting projects.

If you are ready to join our fast-paced company, apply now

We are an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, ancestry, age, or national origin will be considered. No qualified applicants will be discriminated against on the basis of disability or protected veteran status.