Job Op: high-level stats modeling and analysis, Expedia, Seattle

[King Douglas]

Folks,

Just passing this on.  Could be a very good opportunity.  Respond directly to Gil Oakes.

King Douglas
American Airlines
 Director of Search  Operations
 The Adkins Group,  Inc.
 http://www.theadkinsgroup.com/
 [hidden email]
 512-916-9600 Direct
 866-916-9600 Toll
 512-784-6456 Mobile

 Gil Oakes
---------------------------------

 Manager,  Statistical Modeling & Analysis
 Seattle  Area


 Travel  is one of the largest industries in the world, bringing together people,  cultures and destinations across the globe. With more than $17 billion in annual  gross travel bookings, our client plays a leading role in facilitating travel,  whether for business or for pleasure, and is committed to providing travelers  with the very best resources to serve their travel needs.

Are  you a manager looking to lead a team of innovative modelers?  Are you interested in leading a team  that will add value directly to the bottom line of a multi-billion dollar  Internet retailer?  Do you have  excellent people and project management skills?  Do you want to impress your friends with  tales of your fascinating job in the exhilarating travel and leisure  industry?  Are you looking to apply  your mathematical and analytic talents in a creative and innovative way?

 Our  client’s  Customer Analytics team has a tremendous opportunity for a motivated and  experienced technical manager who is up for this challenge. This is your chance  to manage an entire team of people who are driving innovative applications of  management science. With your technical skills and people management skills, you  will have the opportunity to solve complex data modeling and revenue management  issues while communicating to business owners and product development members.  The Customer Analytics team focuses on the application of advanced analytic  techniques (e.g., predictive modeling,  data mining, optimization, etc.) to business problems across all lines of  business.

This  position is not just a job change, it's a career move. We offer you  challenging problems, a fun and fast-paced environment, intelligent co-workers,  and the freedom to learn new things. The team is involved in system development  of cutting-edge features that integrate with the live-site  product.

The  Customer Analytics team works on projects such as...
•  Internet Fraud  –  Develop sophisticated predictive models to apprehend online fraudsters; your  models could even help the police bust up rings of  criminals!
 •  Pricing –  What should we charge our customers?  To where?  For what period of travel?  And what are our competitors  charging?  You will help us answer  these kinds of tough questions as we refine our pricing  models.
•  Recommendation Technology  –  Amazon does it; even your Tivo does it.   Recommending things to customers that we know they might like to buy is  an important way for us to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty, as well as  increase revenue.
•  Hypothesis Testing  –  Which works better: a feature that simplifies our homepage or a complicated  feature that gives the user more control?   We are constantly trying to improve our website, and your management of  our in-house hypothesis testing system is crucial to highly visible  “go  / no-go”  decisions.
 •  Marketing Analytics  –  Help us help you!  Your models can  allow us to better target our customer base with outbound offers and promotions  by sending the right offer to the right person.

Responsibilities
•  Lead a team of up to six highly-technical modelers and data miners.
 •  Mentor team members in their career development.  Guide direct reports in areas such as  SAS programming skills; technical skills development; advanced mathematics;  project management.
 •  Propose and lead innovative mathematical approaches to solving complex business  problems, utilizing available research at your  disposal.
•  Serve as the primary point of contact for other internal departments with  analytic and modeling needs.  Assess  the scope and resources required of various analytics projects in the company,  and help prioritize and staff them  accordingly.
 •  Guide and mentor other modelers in best practices regarding methodology, as well  as implementation (proper documentation, source control, and coding  practices).
 •  Perform analyses, statistical design, statistical coding, and model validation  in support of business requirements.

 Technical  Expertise
 Your  technical expertise and past experience ought to include the ability to do the  following:
•  Generate statistical code that executes in an autonomous production environment  and fully considers error handling, exception conditions,  etc.
•  Perform unit testing and model validation of statistical  routines.
•  Collaborate extensively with stakeholders, program management, and software  development team members to ensure that solutions meet business needs, permit  valid inferences, and have functional implementability.
•  Document the technical details of your work to improve collaboration with other  team members.

Requirements
•  8-10+ years professional experience in a modeling or analyst role, someone with  high energy and creativity and an openness to new  ideas/approaches.
 •  3-5+ years of managing technical teams.
•  Master’s  degree (Ph.D. preferred) in quantitative discipline such as statistics,  economics, applied mathematics, quantitative methods, operations research,  research methodology, etc. Comprehensive understanding of quantitative methods  and extreme attention to detail.
•  Previous experience in the e-commerce and/or travel/hospitality domain  preferred.
•  Strong proficiency in SAS and demonstrated ability to produce both ad hoc  analyses and production-grade analytic jobs that execute  autonomously.
•  Functional proficiency in SQL.
•  Experience in several of the following areas: predictive modeling (including  ARIMA and regression techniques), neural nets and self-learning models, linear  and non-linear optimization, etc.
•  Ability to estimate required effort for project objectives and prioritize work  items  appropriately.

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