Senior Data Analyst, Platform Excellence Ops Analytics

Overview

About the Role - 

As a Senior Data Analyst, you will be responsible for understanding and improving the quality of Instacart’s online grocery business. You will help set up scalable monitoring systems to understand our business performance for driving strategic decisions and help inform when operations or processes are broken. You will play a pivotal role in leveraging operational performance data to diagnose performance or user experience gaps in order to create data-driven recommendations to improve our product and processes. Your work will also entail supporting cross-functional data needs to facilitate improvements across multiple fronts.

About the Team - 

The Platform Excellence Operations (PEO) team is dedicated to improving the quality of Instacart’s online grocery experience for our customers, shoppers, and retailers. The analytics team focuses on identifying, understanding, and eliminating defects in the online grocery experience by analyzing and interpreting operational data. The team ensures that stakeholders have a consistent understanding of why business performance is changing and advocates for improving poor experiences that may be overlooked. You’ll be part of a dynamic cross-functional team that collaborates closely with stakeholders to provide critical data insights to enhance our operations and overall customer experience.

As part of the Consumer Pillar within PEO Analytics, you will be working on problems anywhere between a customer landing on the homepage to when they contact Instacart for support after their order. Your goal is to make sense of how the customer uses Instacart and help the business understand where friction might occur in the shopping or contact funnel. 

About the Job  

This role will support a new area of focus for the team. We are looking for someone who can work with cross-functional leaders in product to establish buy-in for operational monitoring and analysis. You will be expected to:

Metrics and Reporting 

• Work with cross-functional stakeholders in Data Science and Product to create 'source of truth' dashboards and future-proof, flexible dashboards.
• Monitor performance fluctuations and outliers in key performance metrics within the customer funnel to understand root causes and determine if corrective actions are required

Data Analysis

• Analyze large text and numerical datasets within search, browse, order, and post-order contact to derive business insights
• Design new data schemas matching business needs and link them to existing data for analysis
• Define structured frameworks to measure and track against qualitative top customer problems and opportunities)
• Independently create and execute analytical plans to identify, understand, and reduce known customer problems
• Provide support in sizing initiatives on product and analytical roadmaps

Presentations and Communication

• Create and present insights decks to a cross-functional audience of business leaders, Product Managers, Product Operations and engineers on a weekly cadence
• Approach problems with a solutions-oriented mindset by developing business cases with clear logical narratives backed by data that result in actionable recommendations
• Influence cross-functional stakeholders and build out operational analytics capabilities in a new domain
• Support alignment conversations related to domains, swimlanes, and skills with cross-functional stakeholders
• Help elevate the team’s technical acumen through mentorship and initiating learning opportunities
• Provide thought leadership to Pillar Lead when planning future strategic initiatives for the team 

About You

Minimum Qualifications

• 5+ years experience in a data analytics related role (e.g. data science, business intelligence, corporate strategy, consulting, etc)
• Experience analyzing and visualizing large datasets
• Ability to aggregate and synthesize large amounts of data and leverage a deep understanding of micro and macro fulfillment metrics and systems to drive insights
• Strong stakeholder management skills - able to define stakeholder needs and concerns. Initiates methods to engage them, build trust, and propel ambiguous projects forward
• Strong problem solving skills - able to quickly detect anomalies in performance metrics and trends, form hypothesis for investigation, and draw conclusions by conducting nuanced analysis
• Strong verbal and written communication skills, including the ability to lead meetings and synthesize complex topics by creating compelling narratives for various stakeholders
• Advanced proficiency of SQL and Excel / GSheets for data analysis
• Proficient with Powerpoint / GSlides for effective communication
• The ideal candidate will have a knack for identifying unusual patterns, a keen eye for detail, and is passionate about investigating problems to determine root causes.
• Effective prioritization and ability to balance quality and speed in a time constrained environment
• Ability to work independently with a strong sense of ownership
• Comfortable proposing new ideas to challenge the business and rally stakeholder champions behind it

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience working with consumer shopping funnel or post-order contact data
• Experience in optimizing data models and queries for performance
• Familiarity with: Snowflake/Databricks/BigQuery or similar data warehouses, DBT/Apache Airflow or similar orchestration tools, Github, and Jira 
• Familiarity with Visualization Tools: Mode, Tableau, or similar
• Proficiency in Python or R for data analysis and visualizations
• Experience working directly with product/engineering teams on scalable process solutions