Senior Manager, Data Science; AI Technical Lead Gen Customer Engagement & Returns

Position Summary...

The Vision:
Rewiring the Omni-Channel Experience with AI The world of retail is undergoing a massive paradigm shift, and AI is at the helm. At the intersection of consumer behavior and complex supply chain logistics lies one of the biggest challenges—and opportunities—in the industry:
Omni-Channel Returns. The Customer Engagement Services team is building an autonomous, intelligent ecosystem that doesn't just process returns; it predicts, personalizes, and prevents friction. We are moving beyond reactive dashboards to deploy Agentic AI and Causal Machine Learning systems capable of digesting multi-modal data, diagnosing root causes of customer pain points, and triggering real-time, personalized interventions.

We are seeking a Senior Manager, Data Science to serve as the Technical Lead and visionary for this initiative. You are a high-impact player-coach who thrives at the bleeding edge of AI but demands rigorous software engineering standards. You won't just build models; you will architect the intelligent systems that redefine how we interact with our customers.

• Architect Autonomous AI Systems: Design the end-to-end algorithmic framework for our proactive returns intelligence agent. You will fuse Causal Inference ,
  Deep Learning , and Large Language Models (LLMs) to analyze structured transaction data alongside unstructured customer feedback, chat logs, and product reviews.

• Lead the Transition from Insight to Action: Spearhead the application of Causal AI to understand the  why  behind return behaviors. You will move the team beyond simple correlation to answer counterfactuals (e.g.,  If we offer a 15% discount right now, will it save the sale and the customer relationship? )

• Drive Engineering Excellence: Act as the ultimate gatekeeper for the AI codebase. You will mentor a team of brilliant Data Scientists, elevating their engineering maturity from local  notebook scripts  to scalable, modular, and deployable production packages. You will enforce strict version control (Git), conduct rigorous code reviews, and mandate comprehensive unit/integration testing.

• Pioneer ML & GenAI Observability: The real world is chaotic. You will design state-of-the-art MLOps and monitoring frameworks to track real-time model performance, data drift, and LLM hallucination rates. You ensure our AI agents adapt dynamically as consumer trends and macroeconomic factors shift.

• Strategic Technical Leadership: Translate highly ambiguous business objectives ( Reduce omni-channel friction ) into concrete, executable AI roadmaps. You will bridge the gap between complex algorithmic concepts and executive business strategy.

• Hands-On Innovation: Roll up your sleeves. You will write high-performance, fault-tolerant Python and Py Spark code for the most complex, mission-critical components of our recommendation engines.

• Advanced Modeling: Deep expertise in time-series forecasting, anomaly detection, and modern predictive modeling.

• Causal Inference & Experimentation: Proven ability to apply causal frameworks (e.g., Do-calculus, causal impact, propensity matching) to observational data to isolate exact friction points in the return journey.

• NLP & GenAI: Experience leveraging Natural Language Processing and LLMs to extract sentiment and actionable features from unstructured customer engagement data.

• Core Stack: Expert-level fluency in Python and SQL .

• Distributed Computing: Strong hands-on architecture experience with Py Spark and handling massive, petabyte-scale datasets.

• Engineering Rigor: You don't merge code without tests. Extensive experience with Unit/Integration Testing (pytest) and advanced Git management (branching strategies, CI/CD pipeline integration, conflict resolution).

• Model Deployment: Experience with Docker/Kubernetes for containerized model serving, and familiarity with cloud infrastructure (GCP, or AWS) to optimize compute resources for heavy AI workloads.

• Mentorship: A proven track record of upskilling technical…