Senior Applied Scientist, Forecasting

About the role

The Business Forecasting Group at Zillow in Bengaluru shapes planning across Zillow’s businesses by translating housing market and business signals into actionable outlooks using rigorous statistical methods. As a Senior Applied Scientist, you will design, implement, and refine advanced statistical and machine learning approaches to generate accurate, scalable forecasts, own the end-to-end modeling lifecycle, and translate forecasts into clear insights for senior leadership. This is an office-based role requiring regular work at the Zillow India office for approximately 80 to 100 percent of the time each month, with employees expected to live within a reasonable commuting distance.

What you’ll do

• Design and evaluate statistical, econometric, and machine learning methods for forecasting problems to increase forecast accuracy and accelerate delivery timelines
• Propose and evaluate novel methods to reasonably forecast asset level performance
• Build backtesting and validation frameworks to assess forecast accuracy, stability, and downstream forecast impact
• Own the end-to-end modeling lifecycle, including scoping, feature engineering, model development, experimentation, deployment, monitoring, and model explainability
• Translate forecasts into clear insights and recommendations for senior leadership, helping stakeholders understand drivers, uncertainty, and trade-offs
• Quantify uncertainty and clearly communicate model confidence, limitations, and trade-offs to technical and non-technical audiences
• Partner cross-functionally with finance, product, engineering, marketing, and operations to scale and improve forecasting capabilities across Zillow
• Improve and contribute to shared forecasting tools, data pipelines, and processes used across the company

What you’ll bring

• Advanced degree (PhD or Masters) in Economics, Statistics, Operations Research, Data Science, Computer Science, Econometrics, Mathematics, or a related quantitative discipline
• 5+ years of experience in professional applied scientist roles
• Strong experience with time-series forecasting, econometrics, or related quantitative modeling techniques
• Strength in data engineering principles to help envision efficient data solutions at scale
• Experience building applied statistical or machine learning models that support real business decisions in production settings
• Proficient in Python and SQL for data analysis, model development, validation, and deployment
• Experience explaining complex models and analytical concepts to stakeholders with non-technical backgrounds using clear takeaways and practical business framing
• Comfortable working with incomplete, delayed, or noisy real-world data and designing robust estimation strategies

Skills

Benefits

• Competitive base pay
• Incentive compensation subject to applicable laws and relevant Zillow policies

Education

Advanced degree (PhD or Masters) in Economics, Statistics, Operations Research, Data Science, Computer Science, Econometrics, Mathematics, or a related quantitative discipline