Data Scientist

Data Science is an incredibly complex field: both expansive in scope and intricate in detail. But the core mission of the Data Science team at Tuft & Needle is surprising simple: to help our team make decisions.

While most of the mattress industry operates in a retail/wholesale model, we are vertically integrated. So much so that we can tie our customer satisfaction scores and NPS back to the raw material manufacturers used to supply a customer’s product. Tuft & Needle’s Data Science team uniquely works on all facets of the business: manufacturing, stores, product features, marketing campaigns, customer experiences, and more.

Our entire e-commerce platform and admin tools were built in house by our cofounders and software engineering team. This means that we have a treasure trove of data since the earliest days of the company’s existence. We’ve hand selected a limited number of third party platforms with APIs to ensure we have unfettered access to our data.

We use a whole stack of tools to help our team with making decisions. For insights, we use Looker to give other teams immediate access to custom dashboards, and data exploration. For more complex analysis, we use R and/or Python to do statistical modeling and visualizations. We’re constantly adding to our toolset and are always open to new technologies: At Tuft & Needle, we believe in using whatever tools make us most effective.

We are a small, tight team that shares responsibilities and avoids siloing. We are partly remote and travel to meet up for quarterly retreats. The team highly values teaching each other: we read through books together, pair and review each other’s code, and share insights and challenges in this new and exciting field!

As a whole, Tuft & Needle is a boot-strapped, close-knit team who prioritizes honesty and transparency in our customer interactions, our employee experience, and our product development. We value continuous learning as well as personal growth and development over endless corporate hierarchy, and we’re not afraid to make changes if something isn’t working.

What you’ll do:

• Analyze customer data to understand buying behavior and consumer preferences.
• Use predictive modeling to forecast customer behavior
• Help design and interpret experiments across the company
• Use machine learning for anomaly detection, classification, and prediction
• Improve on existing management reporting
• Present insights to the various teams of the company. Partner with those teams to adjust and design their strategies using such data.

Values of the Data Science Team:

• Intellectual honesty
• Results over process
• Focus on the decision
• Empathy for who you’re helping

Qualities We’re Looking For:

• Thorough understanding of Bayesian statistics
• Passion to learn what drives our customers’ behaviors
• High proficiency in R and/or Python
• Experience working in a company culture that values intellectual honesty and intellectual curiosity
• Strong understanding of predictive modeling as well as machine learning techniques (such as Cross Validation, Random Forests, K-Nearest Neighbor, etc)
• Ability to analyze and understand business data; comfortable presenting actionable results in a way the business understands and can act on
• A great attitude and patience in helping others understand what might be obvious to you, but possibly foreign to them; an ability to teach others

Time & Benefits:

• Full time, 40 hours a week
• Free mattress
• Health benefits for employee and dependents
• Paid Maternity/Paternity leave
• 401k with company match
• Generous vacation and sick leave policy
• Monthly company events
• Snacks and drinks stocked in the fridge
• Casual dress code, open office environment
• Located in Greater Phoenix Area, reliable transportation to office is necessary

Tuft & Needle is a Phoenix-based startup founded in 2012 that is redefining the mattress industry. We design a simple, universally comfortable mattress that is the #1 rated furniture product on Amazon. Tuft & Needle is joining the vertical ecommerce revolution with the likes of Bonobos and Warby Parker by selling high quality mattresses directly to consumers over the internet.

Made in the USA, our mattress ships right to your door in a surprisingly small box. No gimmicks, no sales tactics, 100 night trial and easy returns. Tuft & Needle was featured in Fortune, Fox Business and Dwell Magazine to name a few. Tuft & Needle is growing quickly with many opportunities. We’ve only begun to scratch the surface of what’s possible.