Wayfair

Position Title/Short Description

Full Text of JOE Listing:

Wayfair is a Fortune 500 technology company, selling home goods (including furniture), primarily online. We plan to hire about fifteen economists on this job market, tripling the number of economists currently working at Wayfair. We have a multitude of fascinating economic problems to work on, including pricing millions of products, causally estimating the effectiveness of various levers using both observational and experimental data (“how much do fast shipping or sales flags matter for a product, and does demand depend on products nearby in search results?”), and demand forecasting at scale using a combination of time series and machine learning techniques. We apply cutting edge methods from the frontier of the academic literature and as a result expect our economists to stay sharp. You’ll have the opportunity to work with external academic scholars who partner with us in ongoing consulting engagements and to help identify additional academics to work with.

We know why we need economists, how economists can best work with other scientists, technologists, and business partners and have senior economists with experience developing economists in the tech sector. Senior business leaders at the company up to the CEO know the value that economists can bring and are looking for strong economists to work on greenfield problems and to shape the culture of economics at Wayfair.

You will be joining us at an exciting moment in the company’s growth and in the establishment of culture of economics within the company. Joining now will allow you to have outsized opportunity for impact at the company level. In contrast to other established econ in tech roles, you’ll likely be the first economist working on a particular problem or within a business vertical, starting something from scratch rather than iterating on a versioned release of a legacy model.

We are very interested in both new PhD candidates, as well as more experienced candidates -- current academics, economists in litigation consulting (we offer better work/life balance (!) and our problems require a larger variety of techniques)), and in government agencies or public policy think tanks. We are hiring on a rolling basis (before the AEAs) and are looking for candidates who can start soon. All economist positions are based in Boston, Massachusetts.