URBN Senior Data Science Manager

URBN is seeking a Senior Manager of Data Science to serve as a strategic lead and operational force for a high-growth digital commerce initiative. You will guide a team of data scientists and analysts to empower intelligent decision-making across the product lifecycle, from fashion trend analysis and product concepts to marketing activation and forecasting. 

In this role, you act as a full-service solution provider, managing projects from initial ideation through the deployment and maintenance of production services. You will operate in a complementary partnership with a Senior Principal Data Scientist to form a unified front for the initiative. While you own delivery mechanics and talent growth, you are also responsible for long-term technical strategy and bringing unique AI innovations to fruition to power the next evolution of intelligent commerce at URBN.

Who You Are

• Technical Mentor: You maintain a mastery of ML and GenAI architectures, allowing you to act as a credible sounding board for your team and technical lead counterpart on critical missions.
• Strategic Architect: You identify new development areas, shape multi-quarter technical roadmaps, and lead teams through complex problem solving to bring original ideas to life.
• People Leader: You excel at building teams and managing careers ranging from interns to Senior Data Scientists through the lens of technical excellence.
• Collaborative Partner: You translate complex AI concepts into clear business recommendations for diverse stakeholders and navigate a fast paced retail ecosystem with curiosity.

Team Leadership & Talent Strategy

• Lead a team of data scientists, identifying strengths and development areas to foster a collaborative and inclusive environment.
• Own talent strategy and career development, providing one on one coaching, facilitating access to training, and delivering advice to help team members advance from individual contributors to technical leaders.
• Drive the recruiting and retention of top data science talent, ensuring the team's growth aligns with the scaling needs of the initiative.

Roadmap, Planning & Execution

• Serve as the end to end owner of project delivery, managing resources, timelines, and the operational cadence from inception to completion.
• Act as a primary interface for stakeholders, prioritizing initiatives to protect the roadmap and ensuring the team hits high impact milestones on time.
• Collaborate with Product Management and peer partners to define and execute technical roadmaps, ensuring data science capabilities are integrated into the core platform strategy.
• Drive the end-to-end realization of unique AI initiatives, taking your own ideas and stakeholder needs from initial concept through to production-level GenAI, vision, and forecasting solutions.

Technical Excellence & Guidance

• Serve as the final technical sign off for the team's output, reviewing and approving technical approaches to ensure they are sound, scalable, and align with project goals.
• Maintain a hands-on presence by contributing to code performance optimization, data engineering, and quality assurance to ensure production level reliability.
• Partner with the Senior Principal Data Scientist to bridge the gap between prototyping and production scale execution, translating high level technical vision into actionable software design.
• Collaborate with Engineering to ensure data sources and infrastructure are designed to support production level machine learning and custom reporting.

• 5+ years of experience in data science or analytics roles with demonstrated progression in scope and responsibility.
• 2+ years of leadership experience, specifically in managing data science teams, recruiting talent, and retaining top performers.
• Strong proficiency in Python and SQL for data manipulation, analysis, and code review.
• Experience with managing complex, large-scale data science projects from inception to production.
• Familiarity with the AI/ML lifecycle, including understanding model experimentation, monitoring, and maintenance in a production setting.
• Exposure to modern AI domains, such as Generative AI, Large Language Models (LLMs), Computer Vision, or multimodal embedding models is highly preferred.
• Bachelor's degree or higher in a quantitative discipline (Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science, or related field).
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to distill complex ML concepts into practical industry applications for non-technical leadership.

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URBN offers comprehensive Perks & Benefits to employees. Availability and eligibility to specific benefits may be subject to your location and employment status. Benefits include medical, dental, vision, PTO, generous employee discounts, retirement savings and much more! For additional information visit www.urbn.com/work-with-us/benefits

URBN celebrates diversity and is committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. We are proud to provide equal employment opportunities (EEO) to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, sex (including gender, pregnancy, sexual orientation, and gender identity or expression), religion, creed, age, physical or mental disability, national origin or ancestry, ethnicity, citizenship, service in the uniformed services, genetic information, or any other protected characteristic as established by law. We believe strongly in fostering a safe, fair and respectful work environment. To ensure compliance with our non-discrimination and anti-harassment policies, we offer anti-harassment training to managers and employees.