Senior Data Engineer - Store + Operations

Los Angeles, CA (Preference for Los Angeles, open to remote)

Who We Are

At sweetgreen, we believe models should be built in concert with the data pipelines that feed them and the services that actionize them. We respect deep statistical knowledge, but value those who can turn research findings into production assets. We’re problem solving engineers first and foremost, but specialize in problem solving with large volumes of data and scientific methods.

Sweetgreen is on a mission to connect people to real food. The Food Prep Life Cycle Engineering Domain is tasked with building software systems that help achieve this by answering questions like:

• How do we instrument supply chains to deliver the highest quality local ingredients to our kitchens at their peak freshness? 
• How do we prep ingredients throughout the day to meet the complexities of customer demand?

Answering these questions requires time series forecasting. That’s where you come in.

Who You Are

You are a thought leader and a productive contributor that we rely on for improving the performance of our existing time series forecasts and the implementation of new ones. You know how to characterize trend and seasonality, construct and clean datasets, tune models, and evaluate performance. You know when and why classical approaches to time series forecasting, like ARIMA, are most effective. You know when more sophisticated algorithms, like RNNs, yield better results. You might be familiar with boxed solutions like Prophet and DeepAR.

Top Goal -  Within 90 days, have defined a plan to achieve incremental performance improvements across all forecasting models and are on pace to achieve the agreed upon milestones. 

Though your primary goal is to work on model performance improvements, you know that even a highly performant model needs to be constructed within a scalable and fault tolerant system. For this reason, you are able and willing to design data pipelines that scale with the business using frameworks like Spark. You are able and willing to contribute to service development to make a production reality of a model. Finally, you’re passionate about the tooling that makes these types of systems more enjoyable to maintain. 

Your Impact 

• Assess the existing models and systems: In your first two weeks, you’ll have developed an understanding of the existing forecasting models, their relevant systems, and their historical performance.
• Design a plan for performance improvements: Within 45 days, you’ll have worked with Product to understand the performance improvement priorities and with your fellow engineers to define a technical plan for achieving them. 
• Lead the Technical Implementation: By day 90, you will spend 75%+ of your time conducting research and implementing findings. In partnership with Product and Technical Program Management you’ll hold yourself accountable to the dates that you committed to.
• Monitoring Performance: By day 90, you will be actively monitoring the performance of all forecasting models. You will use this to guide your in flight work. Furthermore, you will be continuously cycling the performance results into thinking about system wide improvements and championing them when possible.
• Raise The Bar: At sweetgreen we dedicate a portion of our attention to matters that may not be immediately customer facing and instead allow for us to work smarter, or faster, or simply reduce friction in the developer experience.

Your Accomplishments 

• Demonstrated track record of building exceptional software 
• Extensive experience and knowledge with Python
• Knowledge and experience with AGILE methodology.
• Experience consuming RESTful APIs.
• Demonstrated track record of building, deploying, tuning, and maintaining forecasting models
• A strong desire to experiment with bleeding edge technology and understand relating market trends
• A strong desire to experiment with bleeding edge technology and understand relating market trends.
• Strong problem solving, communication, and creative skills.
• Strong time management.

Engineering Culture

At sweetgreen our business evolves every day as do the solutions we invent to meet those emerging needs. We believe that it’s a mix of individual skill and collaboration that leads to successful outcomes. There is no standard definition of what an Engineer is or does, and depending on where you’re coming from things might look a little different.

We’re technology agnostic, but we have a propensity to leverage lean tools that are best suited to get the job done. Our most popular choices are Node and Ruby, and are often deployed to either a severless or container orchestrated platform. Our frontend clients leverage a variety of frameworks, including React. We try not to over index on the latest tech and to instead focus on the tools that allow for the greatest development experience, quality of work, and productivity.

We value, encourage, and support diversity in backgrounds and opinions. We are human, fallible, life-long learners - we make mistakes from which we learn and grow. We partner with Product, Design, Data, IT, Operations, and Business stakeholders in long-term ownership of the solutions we build to improve the lives of our customers.

Our mission within Engineering is to create, operate, and continually improve upon software critical to the overall sweetgreen mission. We provide technical expertise, guidance, and vision to our partners and stakeholders in order to inform sustainable thinking across sweetgreen.

Our sincere vision is to be a world-class engineering organization leading the food experience revolution.

What you'll get

• Three different medical plans to suit your and your family's needs
• Dental and Vision insurance
• Flexible PTO plan
• 401k; company match of 50% up to 3% of employee contribution
• 5 months paid family leave; we believe in fully supporting new parents
• Employee HSA and FSA
• Complimentary greens
• An opportunity to make a real impact on the people around you, both by growing them and by connecting them to real food
• To live the sweetlife and celebrate your passion + purpose
• A collaborative team of people who live our core values and have your back
• A clear career path with opportunities for development, both personally and professionally
• Free sweetgreen swag

Come join the sweetlife!

About sweetgreen

sweetgreen is on a mission to build healthier communities by connecting people to real food. We passionately believe that real food should be convenient and accessible to everyone. Every day in each sweetgreen, our 3,500 team members make food from scratch, using fresh ingredients and produce delivered that morning. And in our local communities, we’re committed to leaving people better than we found them. We’re in the business of feeding people, and we’re out to change what that means.

sweetgreen provides equal opportunities for everyone that works for us and everyone that applies to join our team, without regard to sex or gender, gender identity, gender expression, age, race, religious creed, color, national origin, ancestry, pregnancy, physical or mental disability, medical condition, genetic information, marital status, sexual orientation, any service, past, present, or future, in the uniformed services of the United States (military or veteran status), or any other consideration protected by federal, state, or local law.

sweetgreen participates in the federal government's E-Verify program to determine employment eligibility. To learn more about the E-Verify program, please click here.