Director, Data Science

8901 - Corp Office West Crk - 12800 Tuckahoe Creek Parkway, Richmond, Virginia, 23238

CarMax, the way your career should be!
About This Job

The primary responsibility for the Pricing team is to accurately and systematically value each individual car that we buy and sell. Last year, CarMax sold over 1 million vehicles and appraised over 2 million vehicles, and Pricing directed over $20B in spend to purchase inventory. To properly value these vehicles, our team must develop and operationalize algorithms that best reflect customer preferences for each vehicle's unique characteristics and that effectively respond to constantly changing consumer demand, wholesale auction supply, and other global/local market conditions.

A Director, Core Pricing Systems, owns the pricing of vehicles in one of three key business areas:

1. Retail Pricing - Initially price every retail vehicle

2. Appraisal Pricing - Determine customer offer on appraisals

3. Offsite Buying - Optimize purchases from auto auctions

What You Will Do - Essential Responsibilities

1. Develop optimal pricing strategies that meet both short- and long-term business objectives

• Leverage exceptional business knowledge, creativity, vision and analytic skills in order to lead the development of optimal pricing strategies

• Develop right optimization strategy given CarMax's unique business model of selling a non-commodity product at a no-haggle price.

• Leverage strong analytic communication skills to gain broad buy-in to pricing strategies and goals at all levels of the organization (ranging from the CEO, COO & CFO to the Regional & store leadership teams)

• Continuously improve our pricing strategy by delivering $15-30MM/yr of incremental value

2. Build a highly engaged team of 4-8 Data Scientists with the skills to implement our pricing strategies across hundreds of thousands of vehicles each year

• Create a rewarding and challenging environment designed to teach uniquely gifted analytic professionals how to become effective, value adding data scientists

• Leverage strong functional expertise in a quickly evolving field to ensure that team members have the right technology to meet today's business needs.

• Set specific, actionable short and mid-term goals for each team member

• Challenge, develop & recognize team members when they achieve their goals

3. Lead the building of Artificial Intelligence to autonomously price every vehicle in an optimal way

• Leverage strong mathematics, statistics and technology skills (machine learning, Python,...) in order to lead the development of sophisticated pricing models that autonomously implement our strategies

• Lead cross functional efforts with Product, Technology, and Field teams to implement new models

• Apply experiment test and design skills in order to measure the business impact of different pricing changes

4. Develop and execute a management system that ensures the right value is put on every vehicle every day

• Ensure that the model is tuned to current market conditions by identifying times when immediate strategy changes are needed (ex: spike in gas prices)

• Build and execute a management system to ensure that the model is delivering intended values (alert system, regular review meetings...)

• Quickly respond to and resolve pricing system issues regardless of time of day/week

Purpose of the Role

CarMax relies on algorithms to make important decisions about which cars to buy, how to price them, and how to allocate them across our 200+ stores. Doing so ensures that we have the right cars at the right prices to meet our customers' needs. As we continue to innovate our business and shift more of our buying and selling online, we increasingly need to make these decisions quickly with less human intervention. Our team of data scientists and business analysts plays a critical role in unlocking the business value from these innovations.

Qualifications and Requirements

1. Ability to perform each of the above essential duties

2. Four-year undergraduate degree with exceptional academic performance (Advanced degree is a plus)

3. 7+ years' experience in strategy, analytics and/or data science

4. Proven ability to deliver business value by leveraging deep analytic skills in order to solve complex business problems

5. Experience working effectively with senior management, particularly with a record of success at selling new ideas

6. Experience managing highly analytical projects and people

Work Location and Arrangement


This role will be based out of the CarMax Technology Innovation Center (Richmond, VA) and associates will work onsite 4 days per week.


Work Authorization: Applicants must be currently authorized to work in the United States on a full-time basis. Sponsorship will not be considered for this specific role.

Upon an applicant's request, CarMax will consider reasonable accommodation to complete the CarMax Job Application.