Senior Data Scientist – Demand Forecasting

Senior Data Scientist – Demand Forecasting Location: Newark, NJ | Onsite, 5 Days per Week Compensation: $180,000–$250,000 Base Salary Employment: Full-Time Why This Role Exists A growing, privately held manufacturing company is seeking an accomplished, hands-on Senior Data Scientist to advance its production machine learning and demand forecasting capabilities. We need someone who has personally built, deployed, and maintained large-scale forecasting models that predict physical-product demand and drive inventory, purchasing, replenishment, and manufacturing decisions. This is a high-ownership technical position within an existing machine learning team. We are looking for an experienced forecasting specialist who has successfully delivered production systems - not someone whose experience is limited to dashboards, traditional demand planning, or experimental models. What You Will Own

• Demand Forecasting: Develop and optimize Python-based machine learning and statistical models predicting demand at the SKU, product, or product-location level.
• Production ML: Own forecasting solutions from model development and validation through deployment, monitoring, retraining, and ongoing improvement.
• Forecast Accuracy: Apply time-series backtesting, feature engineering, forecast bias analysis, and appropriate performance metrics to improve prediction quality.
• Inventory Optimization: Turn forecasts into actionable purchasing, replenishment, inventory, and manufacturing decisions.
• Scale and Reliability: Build forecasting systems capable of handling large product portfolios, seasonality, intermittent demand, and changing business conditions.

What You Need

• Proven experience personally developing and deploying Python-based demand forecasting models in a live production environment.
• Hands-on experience forecasting physical-product demand using SKU-level, item-level, or transactional sales data.
• Strong Python, SQL, machine learning, and time-series forecasting capabilities.
• Experience independently owning forecasting models, including validation, production implementation, monitoring, and improvement.
• Demonstrated ability to connect forecasting performance to measurable business outcomes.

Strongly Preferred

• Experience with large-scale forecasting across thousands of SKUs in manufacturing, retail, e-commerce, consumer goods, or distribution.
• Expertise with XGBoost, LightGBM, ARIMA/SARIMA, Prophet, Croston, or comparable forecasting methods.
• Experience with intermittent demand, hierarchical forecasting, rolling backtesting, WAPE, and forecast bias.
• Production ML infrastructure experience using AWS, Azure, GCP, Databricks, Airflow, MLflow, or comparable platforms.
• Documented improvements in stockouts, inventory availability, working capital, or replenishment efficiency.

What Success Looks Like You independently own forecasting models that operate reliably in production, improve demand accuracy, and directly influence inventory and manufacturing performance. You understand the technical details, the operational decisions, and the financial impact of the systems you build. We are looking for someone who has already delivered production forecasting systems at scale and is ready to take direct ownership of an important business capability.

Email Resume: Joel@maiplacement.com Apply Online: https://jobs.crelate.com/portal/maiplacement/job/57uddx43h4me63xrn6z1157iec Refer a friend, get up to $1,000!