Data Scientist III (Team- Valmo)

About the Role

Meesho is looking for a Data Scientist III (Operations Research) to join the Valmo Data Science team and own a critical workstream within Valmo's network design function. This role involves setting the OR/ML roadmap, being accountable for key north star metrics such as cost per shipment and on-time delivery, and mentoring junior data scientists while shipping optimization systems that power Valmo's logistics network every single day.

Key Responsibilities

• Own a workstream end to end: decide which problems are worth solving, set and drive its roadmap, and be accountable for the movement of its metrics.
• Formulate complex, loosely defined business problems in network design, routing, scheduling, allocation and capacity planning as LP, MILP, MINLP or constraint programming models.
• Solve problems at scale using decomposition techniques (Benders, Lagrangian relaxation, column generation, branch-and-price), heuristics and metaheuristics (LNS, ALNS, tabu search).
• Handle uncertainty using stochastic, robust and chance-constrained optimisation, and validate decisions through simulation.
• Combine OR with ML and DL for demand/volume forecasting, ETA prediction, and learned heuristics.
• Write production-grade code and collaborate with engineering to ship solvers and models with testing, monitoring, and reproducible pipelines.
• Mentor DS1s and DS2s on formulation, modelling craft and code quality; align roadmap with cross-functional stakeholders.
• Publish work at A* conferences and journals as part of an innovative team culture.

Requirements & Qualifications

• Bachelor's, Master's or PhD in Operations Research, Industrial Engineering, Applied Mathematics, Statistics, Computer Science or related quantitative field.
• 5-8 years of experience (or 3+ years with a PhD) applying operations research to real-world problems, with optimisation models deployed in production.
• Deep expertise in mathematical optimisation (LP, MILP, network flows, integer and combinatorial optimisation).
• Experience with large-scale solution methods including decomposition, column generation, heuristics/metaheuristics, and constraint programming.
• Hands-on experience with solvers and modelling tools such as Gurobi, CPLEX, OR-Tools (CP-SAT), HiGHS, Pyomo or PuLP.
• Strong programming skills: expert Python and SQL, PySpark or similar for large datasets, and solid software engineering practices.
• Working knowledge of ML and DL (forecasting, regression, tree-based models, neural networks) and how to combine them with optimisation.
• Experience leading a workstream and mentoring junior data scientists, with ability to explain trade-offs to senior leaders.

Preferred Skills & Nice to Have

• Domain experience in logistics, e-commerce, transportation or supply chain: network design, line haul, vehicle routing or last-mile delivery.
• Experience with deep learning based forecasting, learning-augmented optimisation (ML for combinatorial optimisation, reinforcement learning) or GPU-accelerated optimisation.
• Performance-critical programming in C++, Java or Julia, and familiarity with cloud platforms such as Google Cloud.
• Publications at OR/ML venues (e.g. INFORMS, Transportation Science, Operations Research, NeurIPS, ICML, KDD) or open-source contributions.

Benefits & Perks

• Opportunity to work on high-impact, large-scale logistics optimisation problems at India's leading horizontal e-commerce company.
• Highly innovative work culture with opportunities to publish at top-tier conferences and journals.
• Collaborative environment working closely with product, engineering, operations and business leaders.
• Career growth with mentorship and leadership opportunities within the Data Science team.