Lead Statistician

The Role
The Commercial Analysis team within Food Data Science is recruiting a Lead Statistician to help transform the supply chain of the Marks and Spencer food business

The work is necessarily mathematical and statistical in nature. You should expect to design and build statistical models and use them to deliver clear, practical insights to supply chain colleagues and also to provide foundations for machine learning models developed by the Technology and Modelling team within Food Data Science.

The Team
The Food Data Science team is collaborative and multi-disciplinary. Our core capabilities are analysis, trialling and development of machine learning models. We work with business units across the Food business as well as with support teams including Finance, Data Engineering and Data Quality. Our work has direct and significant impact on the performance of the business.

You will work within the Commercial Analysis team of Food Data Science, which combines commercial insight and statistical skill to drive transformation for Marks and Spencer’s award-winning food business. The team also designs and runs trials to evaluate the effects of commercial transformations.

You would expect to collaborate closely with:

- The Project Management team of Food Supply Chain, who are responsible for the optimisation of the supply chain, including culture change and ways-of-working.
- The Technology and Modelling team within Food Data Science, who design and build statistical machine learning models that run at scale and capture the complexities of our food business.

The Commercial Analysis team within Food Data Science is recruiting for a new Lead Statistician role to help drive the transformation of the M&S Food Supply Chain

**Technical requirements**
- In-depth knowledge of techniques relevant to modelling flow of products through a network, such as time-series modelling, state-space models, hidden Markov models, stochastic process models, dynamic programming
- Detailed understanding of GLM regression and ANOVA-type modelling for unordered independent variables
- Hypothesis formation and hypothesis testing
- Knowledge of analytical and numerical optimisation techniques
- A proven foundation of mathematical skills including linear algebra, calculus and probability
- Experience of, and enthusiasm for, programming statistical workflows using appropriate libraries

**Organisational skills**
- Experience of, and enthusiasm for, collaborative working within a multi-disciplinary team
- Ability to communicate statistical concepts and findings to both technical and non-technical colleagues
- Comfortable managing time to prioritise the activities that add the most value
- Adherence to externally agreed timelines
- Enthusiasm for using statistical methods to drive commercial transformation

**Leadership skills**
- Act as a centre of excellence for Statistics across Supply Chain
- Assume a technical leadership role in statistical techniques and practice within the Food Data Science team
- Organise and lead by example in continuous development of professional skills
- Develop a professional network and bring it to bear for the benefit of Supply Chain and the Food Data Science team

**Ideal requirements**
- Experience with Python (or Scala) and SQL in a big data environment
- Understanding of supply chain theory and practice

M&S is ready to push boundaries to lead the industry into a greener, speedier, more inspiring digital era. That’s why we’re revolutionising how we work and offering our most exciting opportunities yet. There’s never been a better time to be part of our team. Marks & Spencer aims to be an inclusive organisation, trusted and admired by our colleagues, customers and suppliers. Join us and make an immediate impact. We are committed to an active Inclusion, Diversity and Equal Opportunities Policy, which starts with our recruitment and selection process, and we are happy to talk flexible working.

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