Data Analyst - Routing & Sortation

Relay’s Mission is to free commerce from friction
.

Today, high delivery costs act as a hidden tax on e-commerce, quietly shaping what can be sold online and limiting who can participate. We envision a world where more goods move more freely between more people
, making the online shopping experience seamless and accessible to everyone.

• ~160 people
  , around half in engineering, product and data

• 45+ advanced degrees across computer science, mathematics and operations research

• Thousands of data points captured, calculated, analysed and predicted for every single parcel we handle

• An intellectually vibrant culture of first‑principles thinking
  , tight feedback loops and relentless experimentation

Relay is a parcel delivery network. Every night, parcels from online retailers arrive at our sort centres, are sorted into delivery routes, and go out the next day with couriers. Two things have to go right for that to work.

• Monitor the health of each night's route plans: how many parcels each route carries (planned vs what actually happened), how far couriers travel before their first delivery, and the routes no courier should ever be handed - a single parcel stranded miles from every other stop, or one route torn between two towns - and diagnose the cause when any of it moves

• Track how well we predict which parcels will arrive each night: when expected parcels don't show up, or unexpected ones do, work out whether the cause was the retailer's data, a warehouse error, or timing, and improve the prediction rules client by client

• Act on what you find: flag issues to warehouse managers and retailer-facing teams, and correct the plan when a retailer's parcels arrive outside the normal flow

• Monitor the route optimisation engine itself and flag regressions when the software or its inputs change

• Quantify how route design affects courier productivity: deliveries per hour, stops per route, distance between drops - and how far our actual routes sit from the best theoretically possible

• Build the reporting that diagnoses the middle leg of the network: the van journeys that move sorted parcels from sort centres out to local pick-up points where couriers collect them

• Partner with the engineers who build the routing systems to test and validate changes

• Investigate cost per parcel: where are we spending too much, where are savings available, and what's driving the variance

• Track warehouse operative performance: throughput, accuracy, shift utilisation, and the balance between permanent and agency labour

• Monitor sorting robot efficiency and capacity: what volumes can they sustain, where are the bottlenecks, how do they compare to manual sorting

• Build models to predict how many operatives each shift needs, and help automate workforce planning around the best performers

• Compare the parcel volumes retailers actually send us against what they told us to expect, and find where the gaps come from

• Define KPIs and build dashboards that make routing and sortation performance transparent to operations and leadership

• Work with commercial teams to set volume limits and delivery timings that balance growth with operational stability

• You want to understand how an operation actually works, not just analyse it from a distance

• You're comfortable being the person operations and engineering ping first when something looks off in the morning, and you enjoy the detective work of finding out why

• You're excited by cost and efficiency problems - finding where money or time is leaking and building the case for how to fix it

• You can navigate messy operational data and turn it into metrics people trust

• You know how to take a large amount of complex data and visualise it in a way people can actually digest…