Lead Data Scientist, Demand Forecasting

Location: Charlotte, North Carolina, United States; 4–5 days per week in the office, with regular in-person meetings, events, and occasional travel.

Salary: $160,000–$192,500 annual base salary, plus eligibility for an annual performance bonus.

Company

hirify.global is an automotive product company developing electrified pickup trucks and rugged SUVs, backed by Volkswagen Group.

What you will do

• Build hirify.global’ first probabilistic enterprise demand forecasting model using reservations, configurator and order data, market analogs, structured priors, and organic demand signals.
• Solve the cold-start forecasting problem and progressively replace assumptions with real post-launch demand data.
• Own demand data end to end, including sourcing, definitions, pipelines, feature and data layers, data quality, and stewardship.
• Partner with Finance, Commercial, Production, Procurement, IT, Product Management, and engineering to align forecast inputs and outputs.
• Document methodology, quantify uncertainty, and explain forecast logic to non-technical stakeholders.
• Productionize the model in Scout’s digital Integrated Business Planning product and establish deployment, monitoring, back-testing, accuracy tracking, and retraining processes.

Requirements

• 12+ years of applied data science or forecasting experience, or equivalent experience building and shipping statistical or machine learning models.
• MS or PhD in statistics, applied mathematics, physics, operations research, economics, or a similar quantitative discipline, or equivalent applied experience.
• Strong foundation in probabilistic and time-series modeling, including hierarchical or Bayesian methods for granular, sparse, and uncertain demand.
• Fluency in Python and strong SQL skills, with experience owning data pipelines, quality, and shared definitions end to end.
• Experience with sparse, new-product, or cold-start data and with putting models into production alongside engineering and product teams.
• Ability to work from the Charlotte headquarters 4–5 days per week and participate in regular in-person meetings and occasional travel.

Nice to have

• Automotive, manufacturing, or other physical-product demand forecasting experience.
• Demand sensing or hierarchical forecasting experience.
• ML Ops experience.
• Experience embedding models inside a digital product.

Culture & Benefits

• Opportunity to build a new company, planning system, and products from the ground up.
• Medical, dental, vision, and income protection insurance plans.
• 401(k) with employer match and immediate vesting.
• 20 days of planned PTO, 40 hours of unplanned PTO, and 14 company or floating holidays annually.
• Up to 16 weeks of paid parental leave, plus paid bereavement, jury duty, voting, and military leave.