Monday, October 1, 2007

Director, Analytics at Amazon

Amazon.com operates in a virtual, global eCommerce environment without boundaries, and operates a diverse set of businesses in seven countries, including Retail, third party marketplaces, eCommerce platforms, web services for developers. The Director of Analytics in Amazon India will build and lead a team of sophisticated statisticians and machine learning experts who will make a dramatic impact on Amazon through analytically driven decisions on high volume transaction data.

The idealized candidate is most likely to be a hybrid: part visionary/part leader/part builder/part operator. The right person has a unique blend of business judgment, strong product and program management experience, technical expertise and comfort with developing complex yet maintainable large-scale analytic and web-services, some sales and marketing experience in the technology industry, and strong hiring abilities. This needs to be a candidate that is clearly passionate about the large opportunity that the internet and web services present. This presents a significant intellectual and operational challenge with great free cash flow impact. As such, it demands a leader that is extremely attracted to the opportunity and is never satisfied with the results. The ideal candidate is passionate about delivery and achieving the right results, winning, being the developer's advocate, and building a vibrant, robust developer community.

Qualified candidates must be highly analytical, able to assess customer needs via primary and secondary research, adept at stepping back and thinking holistically, skilled at working cross-functionally across geographies and influencing others regardless of where they report in the org chart, experienced at leading teams of super-stars, and a strong oral and written communicator.

Initially, a primary responsibility of the team will be on risk management on the Amazon.com transaction and payment platforms. Responsibilities includes modeling payment risk and fraud, third party merchant risk and credit, assessment of customer risk and trustworthiness, and combating novel types of risk unique to the e-Commerce environment. Detailed responsibilities are:
1) Managing and building risk scoring systems: The Director Analysis will lead the design, development and deployment of state-of-the-art, data-driven predictive models using the latest technologies in statistical modeling, data mining, and machine learning.

Responsibilities include:

  • Analyzing and understanding large amounts of Amazon’s historical business data for specific instances of risk or broader risk trends
  • Design, development and evaluation of highly innovative models for risk management,
  • Statistically evaluating and optimizing business rules and policies,
  • Working closely with software engineering teams to drive real-time implementations of the models and operational business rules,
  • Overseeing implementation of new risk controls, assessing their results, and assisting in the fine-tuning as necessary
  • Working closely with operations staff to optimize fraud detection and risk management operations,
  • Establishing scalable, efficient, repeatable processes for large scale data analyses, model development, model validation and model implementation, and
  • Collaborating with developers to identify and implement internal operational process improvements,
  • Developing metrics and model reports for communication with business leaders,
  • Tracking general business activity and providing clear, compelling management reporting on a regular basis
  • Driving significant improvements in free cash flow through automation.


2) Building analytic systems for topline growth: The Director of Analysis will lead fundamental innovations in analytics for eCommerce to drive topline growth through customer acquisition and promotion activities. Developing a deep understanding of internet consumer-oriented businesses and developing uniquely differentiating analytic approaches suited to web-based businesses will be expected. Simple examples of such activities may include targeting co-branded credit cards using scoring models based on Amazon data, promoting adoption of gift certificates and stored value accounts, acquisition, retention and targeting for subscriptions of various types worldwide.

3) Managing and growing a sophisticated team of analysts: The Director of Analysis will be in charge of a growing a high performance team of analysts in India. He/She will be responsible for managing this team to peak efficiency, enriching the team with exceptional new talent, setting ambitious goals, and driving to operational excellence.

4) Define and meet/exceed service level agreements: The Director of Analysis is expected to define global service level agreements and decision quality metrics with his internal customers, and perform to meet/exceed their requirements. He/She will be expected to be true "owners" of analytics services, be accountable for decision quality and customer experience, and relentlessly drive to excellence.

The ideal candidate for this position would be a highly talented technical leader with 7+ years of exceptional hands-on experience in risk management in financial services, eCommerce, or an enterprise software company building and providing risk management services/software. He/she should have five years of experience managing teams of analysts. A PhD degree in a quantitative business field, operations research, computers science, statistics or related engineering discipline is required. Ability to mentor trained analysts with SAS and SQL experience, plus a good familiarity with BI tools and techniques is desired. The candidate should have good communication skills and good management and leadership experience in an applied setting. He/She should be strongly motivated by entrepreneurial projects and enjoy the opportunity to collaboratively work with a diverse and innovative team of engineers, analysts, operations personnel and business management to achieve superior bottomline results.

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