Lead Data Scientist, Demand

Farmer’s Fridge makes fruits and vegetables accessible and approachable for everyone. We offer a variety of fresh, healthy, ready-to-eat meals and snacks through our fresh food vending machines, wholesale partners, and our office pantry solution — providing chef-curated meals to customers within seconds. Today, we operate a network of Fridges and partner with clients nationwide in high-foot-traffic areas, such as airports, hospitals, universities, and large office buildings — where there is limited accessibility to fresh, healthy, grab-n-go options. We serve healthy, handcrafted meals and snacks from our growing network of 2,000+ Smart Fridges. These software-enabled vending machines are changing the way people think about grab-and-go food. We're building something that's never been done before, and our data tells a story most data scientists never get to work with. We care deeply about what we’re creating and aspire to make sure our customers feel that through every touchpoint. This shows up in many ways across the business. We are committed to prioritizing food safety, we are passionate about product quality, we value our employees, we champion the best idea no matter where it comes from, and we’re committed to making an overall positive impact as we scale. About this Role: Every day we decide how much fresh food to send to each fridge and retail store. Send too little and we lose sales and customers. Send too much and food expires. Our demand planning models sit at the center of that call. The Lead Data Scientist, Demand owns those models. You'll be our first full-time data scientist dedicated to demand planning. We have fridge and retail forecasting models in production today. Your job is to maintain them, make them better, and rebuild them where a better approach pays off. As the core models mature, you'll expand into company-level volume and revenue forecasting. You'll work closely with our Lead Decision Scientist. You own the predictive layer: what will sell, where, and when. They own the prescriptive layer that turns your forecasts into stocking, allocation, and routing decisions. You'll also partner with Data Engineering to run your models in production, and with the demand planning team who use your forecasts every day. Your day-to-day partner is our Manager, Demand Planning. Channel Strategy and Demand Planning set the business rules and objectives your models run on: availability targets, the trade-off between lost sales and waste, and the operating constraints planners live with. Your job is to turn that logic into models that follow it, and to tell us when the data says a rule is wrong. You set the technical bar. The Channel team sets the commercial one. What You’ll Do… Own our fridge and retail demand forecasts end to end: data, features, model, validation, and production. Build forecasts that maximize contribution margin dollars, not forecast accuracy for its own sake. Track the impact through sell-through, unsolds and stockouts against Channel's targets. Watch for forecasts that run consistently high or low by item and fridge, and give the optimization models a realistic range to achieve business goals. Maintain and improve the models in production today. Rebuild them where a better approach clearly pays off. Forecast at the item, location, and day level across 2,000+ fridges and retail partner stores, where demand is often low-volume and intermittent. Model the hard parts of fresh food: stockouts that hide true demand, short shelf life, new fridges ramping up, new menu items, holidays, and promotions. Produce probabilistic forecasts, not just point in time estimates, so our optimization models can weigh the cost of a lost sale against the cost of waste. Partner with the Lead Decision Scientist on the forecast outputs the solver needs. Measure how forecast changes move stocking decisions and results. Build backtesting and monitoring. Judge accuracy on business outcome…

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