Data Scientist, Forecasting

Location: Ann Arbor, Michigan — Hybrid, 2–3 days per week in the office

Reports to: Chief Economist

Level: Mid-to-senior individual contributor

Experience: 5 years

Work authorization: Applicants must already be authorized to work in the United States without employer sponsorship.

Ready Signal helps organizations build more accurate, explainable business forecasts by combining internal business data with external economic, weather, demographic, labor, pricing, and market signals. Our products and services help clients identify meaningful demand drivers, improve forecast performance, and understand what is changing and why.

Ready Signal is seeking a Data Scientist, Forecasting to develop advanced forecasting models and help shape the next generation of our forecasting products and services.

This client-facing role is split approximately evenly between client forecasting and advisory work and internal product development and research
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You will forecast revenue, customer demand, sales, inventory, pricing, staffing, and other operational and financial measures. You will own forecasting methodology, experimentation, validation, and model specifications, then partner with our software engineering team to product ionize successful methods.

You will also work directly with clients, supported by our Client Success team. The right person can move comfortably between statistical modeling, product development, and business conversations. They explain complex results clearly, challenge assumptions constructively, and proactively identify opportunities to improve our models, products, and client outcomes.

• Design, build, validate, and refine forecasting models for business and operational metrics.
• Select approaches based on the business problem, forecast horizon, data-generating process, level of aggregation, and intended decision.
• Apply methods including ARIMA/SARIMAX, hierarchical forecasting, gradient boosting, and neural-network forecasting.
• Identify, engineer, and validate external demand drivers and exogenous variables, including economic indicators, weather, demographics, labor-market data, pricing, consumer behavior, and market signals.
• Develop temporal features such as lags, rolling statistics, trends, seasonality, event effects, transformations, and interactions.
• Conduct backtesting, time-series cross-validation, benchmark comparisons, sensitivity analysis, and forecast-error analysis.
• Evaluate accuracy, bias, stability, uncertainty, and business usefulness—not simply statistical fit.
• Diagnose forecast misses, structural changes, data-quality issues, and model degradation, and recommend corrective action.
• Present forecasts, drivers, risks, limitations, and recommendations to technical and nontechnical stakeholders.
• Partner with Client Success to maintain client satisfaction and ensure deliverables support meaningful business decisions.

• Research, prototype, and evaluate forecasting methods, feature-engineering techniques, model-selection approaches, and validation frameworks.
• Propose product capabilities based on client needs, recurring forecasting challenges, and emerging methods.
• Expand advanced feature engineering across Ready Signal’s products and client engagements.
• Build proof-of-concept models and workflows that can become scalable product features.
• Define model logic, methodological requirements, evaluation criteria, expected behavior, and acceptance tests for software engineers.
• Work with engineering to turn analytical prototypes into reliable production capabilities.
• Benchmark approaches and document their strengths, limitations, and appropriate use cases.
• Monitor developments in forecasting, econometrics, machine learning, and applied AI, identifying methods with practical value.
• Make proactive recommendations rather than waiting for fully specified assignments.

• Serve as a trusted forecasting resource across data science, economics, engineering, product, and Client Success.
• Raise the team’s analytical standard through model reviews, documentation, knowledge sharing, and…