Lead Forecasting & Financial Analyst

Guild is bridging the gap between education and career opportunity, helping employers offer education, skilling, and career mobility
to their employees. The Guild Career Opportunity Platform empowers top companies to help working adults go back to school, with tuition assistance programs that align the corporate business goals with affordable education programs designed for working adults. Guild's curated network of online learning providers and non-profit universities along with one-to-one coaching and support helps each student navigate the worlds of work and school, and grow their careers in the process.

To thrive as a company and meet our impact goals, we must cultivate a culture of high-performance. You can read about our culture principles here .

We know managers are often the single-largest driver of employee satisfaction and growth, and our talent is our biggest asset. Because of that, we’ve identified consistent expectations for all of Guild’s people managers —helping you know what to expect from your experience here.

Guild is hiring a Lead Forecast Modeling Analyst to scale the impact of our Forecasting and Financial Analytics team. You'll own and improve critical components of our most complex and most important forecasting model — working inside a modern, modular forecasting system and experimentation framework to drive step-change improvements in how well we forecast clients' education benefit program.

As a Lead Forecast Modeling Analyst
, you will:

• Develop and improve the usage-based forecasting models for critical components of clients' education benefit with Guild, using advanced statistical and machine learning techniques.
• Raise forecast accuracy and shorten the monthly refresh cycle, using a backtesting and experimentation framework to test methodological changes with rigor. Build tooling and process to catch correctable model issues.
• Transfer modeling logic out of individual heads into well-structured, documented, tested code, building redundancy on a business-critical forecast.
• Partner cross-functionally with Analytics, Data Science, Data Engineering, Product, and Technology teams to improve the data, systems, and infrastructure the forecast depends on.
• Mentor and guide junior team members, fostering a culture of continuous learning and innovation.
• Produce insights, analyses, and recommendations to help internal stakeholders understand forecast drivers and the impact on client and internal business metrics.

You are a strong fit for this role if you have:

• 5+ years of total experience in analytics, data science, forecasting, or financial planning & analysis.
• Strong experience with SQL and experience transforming and structuring large datasets into reusable formats.
• Proficiency in Python and/or R, with depth across time-series and machine learning forecasting methods and sound judgment about the tradeoffs among accuracy, interpretability, and stability.
• Experience operationalizing models — backtesting, validation, monitoring, drift detection, retraining — ideally on a platform such as Databricks with experiment tracking (e.g., MLflow).
• A track record of getting productive quickly in an existing codebase and improving it collaboratively.
• Experience with Looker, Tableau, Omni, or similar data visualization tool.
• Fluency with AI-assisted development tools such as Cursor, Claude Code, or similar coding agents.
• The ability to translate forecasts, including their uncertainty, to clear recommendations for non-technical stakeholders.

We are committed to equal pay for equal work and believe in compensation transparency. All salary ranges are standardized nationwide and will not vary by region. This role offers a competitive total compensation package, including a base salary of $140,000 -…