Director - Commerce Analytics & Intelligence at Dentsu

Job description

The purpose of this role is to develop best in class strategies and management of all Insights and Analysis activity on assigned clients, to manage and develop the team and serve as a point of escalation as needed. Job Description: Merkle's Commerce Analytics & Intelligence practice helps the world's largest retailers, brands, and marketplaces turn data into decisions across the four Ps — product, price, promotion, and place — and against the competitive market. We are moving from an embedded, staff-augmentation delivery model to a craft-led consultancy: named specialists organized by discipline, US-onshore leadership in front of a global delivery engine, and value measured by the decisions we enable rather than the hours we bill. The Director, Commerce Analytics is a US-based onshore craft leader accountable for one of our largest enterprise accounts. You pair fluent business acumen with a strong technical foundation — AI and machine learning, Python, SQL, and cloud computation — and you use both to own the analytics craft end to end: consumer decision modeling, pricing and promotion, assortment and space, and competitive intelligence. You lead a blended onshore/offshore pod, sit at the client's table as a trusted advisor, and trans late business need into a delivery plan the offshore engine executes. This is a build role: you are shaping how the practice operates as much as running the work. What you will own Client partnership. Be the senior analytics voice the client relies on — present the standard rather than wait for the ask, bring proposals not order-taking, and hold the relationship at the business-decision altitude, not the report altitude. The craft. Own the analytics discipline across the account: consumer decision modeling and the semantic/decisioning layer, pricing and promotion, assortment and localization, digital shelf and competitive intelligence — the me-vs-market view of the four Ps. A blended pod. Lead a flat, project-based team drawn from a single global Merkle pool — onshore practitioners in front, offshore engineering and data-science engines behind. Assemble teams around projects, not titles; project leadership follows the work. Delivery you can prove. Stand up and run a value cadence: weekly delivery status with dated milestones, risks and dependencies; monthly project-based business readouts per area; and a scorecard that shows the client what their investment returns — baselines stated honestly, targets met. Documentation and governance. Ensure solutions live visibly in the client's environment with current documentation, clear workflows, and a governance standard any party can pick up — closing the gap between what the team delivers and what the client can see. Growth. Convert delivered value into expansion — new decisions, new areas, new scope — and feed the account's forward pipeline in partnership with account and client-success leadership. What you will bring Fluent business acumen. You read a P&L and a merchant's world with equal ease — you can move between the four Ps and the levers behind them (traffic, transaction, units, conversion, margin), translate a business question into an analytical answer and back, and hold your own in a boardroom, not just a data review. Strong technical background. Deep, hands-credible expertise across the modern analytics and AI stack — AI and machine learning, Python, SQL, and cloud computation (e.g., GCP, AWS, or Azure and their data/ML services) — plus fluency in the market-leading tooling of the moment: LLMs and agentic/GenAI, semantic and decisioning layers, experimentation and attribution platforms, and modern BI. You do not have to be the builder on every project, but you must be credible enough to architect, challenge, and lead engineers and data scientists. 8+ years in commerce, retail, or merchandising analytics, with real functional depth in at least two of: pricing and promotion, assortment and space, consumer decision modeling / CDT, or competitive