Senior Economist - Forecasting

Zillow
Seattle - United States
S: Competitive

About the team

Join our industry-leading Economic Research team bringing innovative analysis, creativity and excellence to the U.S. housing market. We create, productionalize, analyze, and share a full suite of housing data products and analysis for an audience inside and outside of Zillow. Our work contextualizes Zillow's unparalleled living database of all homes and hundreds of millions of customers to provide insight to everyday consumers and open data to hundreds of researchers and policymakers across the country. You'll work in an informal, fun, collaborative atmosphere with a dynamic team with a diverse range of interests and skills.

Learn more about what we are doing at https://www.zillow.com/research

About the role
Zillow Group's Economic Research team is looking for a bright and curious Economist who has a passion for applying creative economic thinking to business problems and solve them systematically with mathematical models. As part of this role, you will:

• Help improve and expand the forecasts of our suite of world-class housing market metrics, from 1 week to several years out
• Provide insights into the drivers of our forecast by highlighting assumptions and outlining what factors drive our view
• Model the intricate relationship between prices, volumes, and other real estate market variables both within and between geographic levels
• Build novel analytical frameworks and models from the ground up
• Communicate results and insights to business, finance, and partner analytics teams
• Work closely with our applied scientists and engineers to productionize models and dashboards

Who you are

You will not shy away from ambiguity or complexity. You will develop a deep understanding of our mission, data sources, metrics. You enjoy sitting with the business, learn about the problems they face, and translate them to models. You are eager to use the intuition you've developed in the past, through excellence in your education and hands-on experience, to help us derive economic insights from our massive data sets. You are passionate about helping our business succeed by making data driven recommendations based on your analysis. You are an owner/operator of your models that takes pride in benchmarking the results of your forecast on a regular basis and creates deep tooling that allows you to explain changes on-demand to a non-technical audience. You will ideally have:

• An advanced degree (PhD preferred) in economics, finance, statistics, or similar
• 3+ years of work experience in a fast paced environment where you systematically provided forecasts as a business critical input
• Proven knowledge of either Python or R
• Familiarity with SQL
• Drive to succeed in a self-starting environment where you can innovate with a high degree of freedom and make a large business impact
• Deep expertise in applied now- and forecasting models (econometric time series models, tree-based methods, etc.)
• Passion for better understanding the relationship between real estate markets, financial markets, and the real macroeconomy
• Experience building interpretable models that allow decomposition and attribution of forecast changes/misses into data and model changes
• Knowledge of how to scale forecasting models to many units (100,000+)
• Strong written, verbal, and visual communication skills
• Experiencing working cross-functionally between business, tech, and science teams

Job summary