* Experience & Domain Knowledge: You have several years of profound experience (ideally 5+ years) in the field of data science - ideally with a clear focus on pricing, revenue management or demand forecasting. You understand the business levers of the retail business such as price elasticities, margin optimization and inventory awareness.
* Methodological excellence: You have sound practical experience with causal inference, time series analysis and tree-based models. You understand how to make a precise methodological distinction between pure correlation and causality.
* Tech stack: You are proficient in Python, PySpark and Databricks. Practical experience with CI/CD pipelines (e.g. GitLab CI), best practices in the area of MLOps (MLflow) and working with data lake architectures (Delta Lake) are familiar to you. Experience with the provision of models via FastAPI and asynchronous architectures (Pub/Sub, GCP) round off your technical profile.
* Ownership & decisiveness: You are happy to take on operational delivery responsibility, represent technical viewpoints confidently and manage complex dependencies proactively. You combine methodical depth with pragmatism and follow a clear MVP-first approach to bring models into production quickly and learn from them iteratively.
* Mentoring & learning culture: You enjoy systematically passing on your knowledge. Through practical "mentoring in code" (e.g. through pair programming and in-depth code reviews), you ensure technical excellence in the team.
Introduction text
Schwarz Digits creates the technological foundation for digital sovereignty in Europe. As the IT and digital division of the Schwarz Group, we develop and manage the IT infrastructures for the retail divisions Lidl and Kaufland, as well as Schwarz Production and PreZero. At the same time, we operate as an independent provider in the external market to support companies across Europe in their digital transformation. We bundle our core services in the areas of Cloud, Cyber Security, Data & AI, Communication, and Workspace.
Join us and contribute to digital sovereignty in Europe. With us, you will work at the intersection of agility and security: You will benefit from fast decision-making processes, enjoy genuine creative freedom in your projects, and be able to build upon the stable foundation of the Schwarz Group.
With us, you will work at the interface between agility and security: you will benefit from fast decision-making processes, enjoy real creative freedom in your projects and build on the stable foundation of the Schwarz Group.
In our Pricing Value Stream for the Lidl online stores, we don't just calculate prices - we build a complex system in which price actively controls demand and ensures dynamic profit maximization. For this challenging mission, we are looking for a technically excellent Lead Data Scientist to take over the operational delivery responsibility (E2E-Delivery) for our division.
Your tasks
* Operational control & E2E delivery: In your role as Lead Data Scientist, you are autonomously responsible for the operational technical implementation. You ensure smooth agile work processes, coordinate the distribution of tasks within the team and reduce critical dependencies on individuals through targeted knowledge building.
* Advanced Pricing Engines: You play a key role in shaping our Demand & Price Elasticity Forecasting in order to decouple absolute demand from pure price sensitivity. You will solve complex challenges such as zero-inflated/sparse demand and model causal price elasticities taking into account economic physics.
* Competitor & Profit Optimization: You develop optimization algorithms that skillfully balance margin protection and competitiveness. You seamlessly integrate complex business and regulatory constraints into the logic and define flexible scopes in order to apply tailored optimization strategies depending on the market or article scope (e.g. branded articles vs. private label articles).
* E2E architecture & scaling: You drive the production lifecycle on our modern stack (Spark, Databricks, Delta Tables). You will design robust inference pipelines and ensure the delivery of our price recommendations via FastAPI, Pub/Sub-Streams and Docker on the GCP.
* Quality Gate & Cross-functional Collaboration: As the operational quality gate of your stream, you ensure our high technical standards. In close coordination with our Tech Lead as a sparring partner, you drive the system architecture forward and ensure successful implementation within the team. You will always find the right balance between time-to-market and sustainable code quality. As a technical counterpart to our Product Manager, you translate complex ML models into the decisive "so what" context. Together, you cut requirements into tangible epics, providing key strategic input for roadmap creation and prioritization.