Staff, Data Scientist

Immigration sponsorship is not available for this role.

The Staff Data Scientist will leverage advanced analytics, machine learning, and data visualization techniques to deliver actionable insights that support strategic business decisions. This role involves identifying and sourcing relevant data, developing and validating statistical, predictive models, and collaborating with cross-functional teams to translate complex data into clear, impactful solutions. The position requires expertise in programming, statistical analysis, and data strategy to optimize model deployment and scalability. The successful candidate will contribute to continuous improvement initiatives and mentor team members while aligning data-driven outcomes with organizational goals. 

About the Team:  

The Merchandising Analytics team at Sam’s Club delivers data-driven insights and strategic guidance to support Merchants in making informed decisions. This team combines advanced analytics, automation tools, and strategic thinking to drive growth and optimize merchandising performance. Focused on translating complex data into actionable outcomes, the team collaborates across functions to identify opportunities and enhance member understanding. By fostering reliability and forward-thinking analytics, the team plays a key role in shaping the future of merchandising, ensuring data informs strategies that strengthen Sam’s Club’s leadership in retail. 

What You'll Do:   

• Identify and source relevant data from multiple business domains and distributed data stores to support analytics initiatives. 
• Perform initial data quality assessments and ensure data meets business requirements and governance standards. 
• Develop, validate, and tune predictive models using advanced statistical and machine learning techniques to solve complex business problems. 
• Create clear and impactful data visualizations to communicate insights and model outcomes to stakeholders. 
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to translate business needs into data-driven solutions and actionable recommendations. 
• Deploy and monitor models in production, ensuring scalability and performance alignment with defined metrics. 
• Mentor team members on analytical methods, coding best practices, and data science workflows. 
• Bridge business and analytics by applying a consultative mindset to data science problems—evaluate whether a problem is worth solving, assess downstream impacts, and ensure solutions align with broader business goals. 
• Design and implement advanced recommendation and assortment models tailored to merchant behaviors, with a focus on quality and pricing optimization across diverse product categories. 
• Develop sophisticated anomaly detection and clustering models that uncover patterns, inflection points, and root causes—delivering actionable insights quickly and accurately for specific categories. 
• Build isolation matrices and causal inference frameworks to drive data-driven decision-making and uncover hidden drivers of business performance. 
• Will be a hands-on technical leader, quickly identifying the right algorithms and approaches to solve complex problems and delivering high-impact solutions with speed and precision. 

What You'll Bring:  

• Proven expertise in predictive analytics, machine learning algorithms, and advanced statistical methods to solve complex business problems. 
• Proficiency in Python programming and data visualization tools such as Matplotlib, Plotly, Tableau, or PowerBI. 
• Strong knowledge of data strategy, data quality standards, and data governance principles within large-scale data ecosystems. 
• Experience in exploratory data analysis, feature engineering, and model assessment using techniques like ROC curve and hypothesis testing. 
• Ability to deploy, monitor, and scale machine learning models in production environments with MLOps best practices. 
• Solid understanding of business context across multiple domains to translate requirements into actionable data solutions. 
• Proficiency in Databricks, GCP, Big Query, and Google ADK.  

Preferred Experience and Qualifications: 

• 10+ years of experience. 
• PhD in quantitative disciplines (e.g., Statistics, Computer Science, Applied Math) strongly preferred.
• Data science experience specific to the retail and/or merchandising space. 
• AI and LLM experience.

About Sam's Club: 
Sam Walton opened the first Sam's Club in 1983 to meet a growing need among customers who wanted to buy merchandise in bulk. Since then, Sam's Club has grown rapidly, opening more than 600 clubs in the U.S. and 100 clubs internationally. By offering affordable, wholesale merchandise to members, Sam's Club helps make saving simple for families and small business owners. Sam's Club employs about 110,000 associates in the U.S. The average club is 134,000 square feet and offers bulk groceries and general merchandise. Most clubs also have specialty services, such as a pharmacy, an optical department, a photo center, or a tire and battery center. 

Future Ways of Working: 
Our company's success can be attributed to our employees. While technology has allowed us to be effective while working remotely, there is no substitute for being in the office together; it helps to shape our culture, collaborate, innovate, build relationships, and move more quickly. We strive to provide flexibility in order to promote a healthy work-life balance but recognize that in-person interactions are important to our culture and shared success. We'll meet in person on a regular and purposeful basis.