Principal Economist - Demand Systems (all genders)

Key Skills

Large scale data processing, Python Programming, R Programming, Spark Core, SQL

Job Description

Want to quantify real-world cross-price elasticities? Estimate competitive intensity? Make millions of counterfactual predictions? And use all this to actively drive quantifiable, significant impact? Then come join our team! As Zalando’s algorithmic pricing team, we price 500K products across 20+ countries every day. To do so, we bring together deep-learning-based forecasting methods with rigorous econometric demand modeling and off-policy learning.

Pricing is a key lever to steer Zalando’s €15+bn in GMV, to improve our platform economics, and to better understand our and partners' competitive positioning in the dynamic fashion marketplace. Better pricing has a significant economic impact, but through managing our seasonal inventory it also reduces waste and our environmental footprint. Here, you can make a real difference at the intersection of state-of-the-art econometrics and causal machine learning.

In this role, you will be a central thought leader in our understanding of demand systems: How does price affect demand? How do value-anchoring effects around discounts come into play? How can we estimate cross-price substitution in a computationally tractable way? Can we measure the role consumer consideration plays? What about competitors' prices? Can we model forward- and backward-looking consumer behavior? How can these insights inform our pricing algorithms, and what might they tell us about related topics such as assortment, marketing, and product ranking?

You will learn about our pricing systems and utilize our full dataset for high-exposure projects. You will be part of a cross-functional team, responsible for selecting the scientific approaches as well as building the systems for pricing science. Your colleagues will include PhD economists, former professors, and machine learning experts. You can grow your career through hands-on implementation of the latest ideas in the literature, and hard-and-fast A/B-tested evidence of your contributions. You’ll get to work and collaborate alongside senior Zalando economists (including Justin Rao and Greg Crawford). You will have access to Zalando’s comprehensive data sources, computational infrastructure, and software tooling.

INCLUSIVE BY DESIGN

At Zalando, our vision is to be inclusive by design. And this vision starts with our hiring - we do not discriminate on the basis of gender identity, sexual orientation, personal expression, ethnicity, religious belief, or disability status. You are welcome to leave out your picture, age, or marital status from your application. We only assess candidates on their qualifications and merit. ​

We want to provide you with a great candidate experience. Feel free to inform us of any accommodations you may need, so we can best support you throughout the hiring process.

do.BETTER - our diversity & inclusion strategy: https://corporate.zalando.com/en/our-impact/dobetter-our-diversity-and-inclusion-strategy

Our employee resource groups: https://corporate.zalando.com/en/our-impact/our-employee-resource-groups

WHAT WE'D LOVE YOU TO DO (AND LOVE DOING)

• Help us reach the frontier of demand estimation: Coming from our existing and validated own-price elasticities, we want to estimate more complete models of demand that include substitution, consideration, display, and competition.
• Help us build a system that uses off-policy experimentation, automated causal learning, demand modeling, and continuous measurement to increase market efficiency and reduce waste.
• We have terabytes worth of observational and experimental data on purchase histories, clickstreams, and product similarity scores, amongst others. You will use these sources as needed, and propose efficient experimentation strategies to generate interventional data where necessary.
• Influence neighboring teams in algorithmic pricing and beyond to allow your breakthroughs in demand estimation to impact Zalando’s pricing and platform algorithms end-to-end.
• As an evangelist of econometric methods, you will collaborate with economists and machine learning experts to build the most data-efficient, impact-oriented pricing solutions possible.

WE'D LOVE TO MEET YOU IF...

• You have an excellent educational background (PhD, or M.Sc. with relevant professional experience) in economics or marketing, ideally specialized in structural empirical industrial organization or quantitative marketing.
• You have a strong background in demand estimation. Ideal candidates have experience building and estimating custom models with large-scale, real-world datasets, as well as making the tradeoffs associated with alternative methodological approaches given the available data.
• You have experience driving product impact: You are able to maintain a medium-term research roadmap while regularly delivering incremental improvements to our systems. You also speak fluent “business” and can work with senior stakeholders.
• Scientific pragmatism: Good judgment for the right level of rigor to deliver results. You know when in-depth modeling pays off, and when pasting aggregated data into a spreadsheet will do the trick.
• You have the ability to implement your models in Python or R, and to wrangle terabytes of data using SQL and/or spark on large, complex datasets.

OUR OFFER

Zalando provides a range of benefits, here’s an overview of what you can expect. Ask your Talent Acquisition Partner to learn more about what we offer.

• Employee shares program

• 40% off fashion and beauty products sold and shipped by Zalando, 30% off Zalando Lounge, discounts from external partners

• 2 paid volunteering days a year

• Hybrid working model with 60% (or more) remote per week, actual practice is up to each team to best support their collaboration

• Work from abroad for up to 30 working days a year

• 27 days of vacation a year (for Zalando SE)

• Relocation assistance available (subject to prior agreement)

• Family services, including counseling and support

• Health and wellbeing options (including Gympass)

• Mental health support and coaching available