---
title: 'Data Scientist at Upshop'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/data-scientist-upshop-mississauga-ddf2k6dvjej3'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-16'
---

# Data Scientist at Upshop

- **Company:** Upshop
- **Location:** Mississauga, Canada
- **Posted:** 2026-10-09
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-16
- **Apply:** https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/upshop/jobs/5262131007

## Job description

Position Overview

We are seeking an engineering-focused Data Scientist to build, operationalize, and maintain production-grade retail forecasting and optimization models. In this role, model development goes hand-in-hand with operational reliability: success is measured by accurate forecasts and stable, low-latency, deterministic pipelines running natively on the Databricks Lakehouse.

You will bridge the gap between applied data science and machine learning engineering. Working in close partnership with Product and Data Engineering, you will own the operational lifecycle of item-store level demand forecasts and downstream replenishment/optimization engines—from distributed feature pipelines to automated Databricks workflows, model tracking, and runtime monitoring.

## Key Responsibilities

- Production Forecasting & Optimization: Develop, calibrate, and tune time-series forecasting engines and downstream supply chain/inventory optimization logic using tree-based ensembles (LightGBM, CatBoost) and distributed Python/PySpark.

- Databricks-Native MLOps: Build, schedule, and maintain automated training and batch inference pipelines using Databricks Workflows and Jobs. Leverage MLflow for robust experiment tracking, artifact logging, and model registry management.

- Cross-Functional Partnership:

- With Product: Translate business requirements into technical specs, define operational SLAs, and provide technical feasibility assessments for new forecasting features.

- With Data Engineering: Establish strict data contracts, define schema validations, and optimize data ingestion/consumption patterns from upstream Delta tables.

- Pipeline Quality & Stability: Treat ML pipelines as critical production software. Implement pre-inference data validation gates (e.g., schema checks, missingness thresholds, null checks) and automated alerting to prevent corrupted data from reaching scoring jobs.

- Model & Pipeline Observability: Track pipeline health, monitor runtime performance, and detect feature drift, target drift, and forecast degradation across high-cardinality retail catalogs.

- Software Excellence: Write modular, maintainable, and testable code. Champion version control best practices, unit/integration testing with pytest, and automated CI/CD checks within Git.

- Spec-Driven Execution: Embrace a Spec-Driven Development (SDD) mindset, leveraging modern agentic AI development workflows (e.g., Cursor, Claude Code) to move rapidly from research to reliable production code.

Required Technical Skills

- Tree-Based Ensembles: Hands-on experience developing, tuning, and deploying gradient boosted decision trees—specifically LightGBM and CatBoost—on high-cardinality, tabular, and time-series datasets.

- Time-Series Retail Forecasting: Deep practical understanding of demand forecasting challenges: trend, seasonality, calendar events, promotional uplifts, stockouts, and intermittent/sparse demand patterns.

- Databricks Platform: Proven experience building within the Databricks ecosystem, specifically authoring and managing multi-task Databricks Workflows/Jobs, navigating Delta Lake, and using MLflow across the model lifecycle.

- Data Manipulation & PySpark: Strong proficiency in Python and PySpark for distributed data processing, feature engineering, and memory-conscious transformations across massive retail datasets.

- Software Engineering Fundamentals: Solid understanding of clean code principles, modular package design, virtual environments, automated testing (pytest), and standard Git workflows (pull requests, branching, code reviews).

## Preferred Qualifications

- Optimization & Supply Chain: Familiarity with inventory optimization mechanics (safety stock calculation, reorder point modeling, lead time variability, allocation constraints).

- Databricks Advanced Features: Experience leveraging Delta Live Tables (DLT), Unity Catalog for data and model governance, or Photon compute engine.

- Explainable AI (XAI): Experience implementing TreeSHAP or similar interpretability methods within production batch scoring jobs.

- Continuous Integration: Experience setting up or integrating with CI/CD pipelines (e.g., GitHub Actions) to automate testing and deployment into Databricks workspaces.

Cultural Alignment & Values

- Production Mindset: You believe a model is only finished when it is tested, automated, monitored, and running reliably in production.

- Ownership & Root-Cause Thinking: When a pipeline fails or a metric degrades, you dig into the logs, identify the root cause, write a regression test, and implement a durable fix.

- Collaborative Communicator: You easily speak the language of business trade-offs with Product managers and system architecture with Data Engineers.

The estimated pay ranges for this role are as follows:

- $120,000 - 140,000 CAD

The successful candidate’s starting salary will be determined based on permissible, non-discriminatory factors such as skills, experience, and geographic location.

## About Upshop

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Upshop provides an AI-powered, SaaS-based Total Store Operations platform that helps food retailers streamline forecasting, ordering, production, and inventory optimization across fresh, center-store, DSD, and eCommerce departments.
- **Entity Type**: Private (part of Invafresh following a 2024 merger)
- **Headquarters**: Austin, Texas, United States
- **Founded**: 1989 (as Application Development Consultants, Inc.)
- **Founders**: Not publicly available (evolved through multiple acquisitions and a merger)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Food retail technology / Grocery technology
- **Target customers**: B2B – grocery retailers, convenience stores, and food retailers (serving 450+ retailers in 50,000+ stores across 35+ countries)
- **Mission or purpose statement**: To deliver a simplified, smarter, more connected store experience that helps retailers improve sales, reduce waste, enhance food safety, and empower associates.

## Products & Services
- **Total Store Operations Platform**: An AI-powered SaaS platform that synchronizes Fresh, Center, DSD (Direct Store Delivery), and eCommerce operations. Includes modules for:
  - **Fresh Operations (FreshIQ®)**: Forecasting, ordering, production planning, and inventory management for fresh departments.
  - **eCommerce Fulfillment (ShopperKit)**: Omnichannel order management and fulfillment orchestration.
  - **Center Store**: Inventory optimization for shelf-stable goods.
  - **DSD Management**: Direct store delivery reconciliation and management.
  - **Date Check Pro**: Food safety and freshness date management.
  - **Magic Inventory Intelligence**: AI-driven inventory visibility and shrink reduction.
- **Total Store Ordering** (launched July 2025): A unified replenishment solution ending fragmentation across departments.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not disclosed (private company)
- **Key Metric**: Annual revenue of approximately $12.3 million (based on 2024 estimates); Total funding not publicly available (funded via Invafresh parent entity)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Invafresh (parent company after 2024 merger), ReposiTrak (strategic partnership for FSMA 204 traceability), Inmar Intelligence (marketing and eCommerce fulfillment partnership), Heritage Grocers Group, Gelson’s Markets (recent customers)
- **Growth Signals**:
  - Headcount of 178 employees (+14.3% YoY growth)
  - Operates in 10 countries with offices in the US, Canada, Sweden, Colombia, UK, and Denmark
  - 2024 merger with Invafresh created the “first global retail operations platform” serving 35+ countries
  - Recent customer wins: Heritage Grocers Group, Gelson’s Markets
  - New product launch: Total Store Ordering (July 2025)
  - 19 active job postings; job postings up 111% year-over-year

## Competitive Advantages
- **Market Leadership**: Positioned as the first total store operations platform specifically built for food retailers, unifying previously fragmented department-level solutions.
- **AI-Powered Predictions**: Uses machine learning for demand forecasting, shrink reduction, and production planning, giving retailers a data-driven edge.
- **Scale & Trust**: Serves 450+ retail chains in 50,000+ stores across 35+ countries, including major grocery names.
- **End-to-End Coverage**: Covers fresh, center, DSD, and eCommerce on one platform — a rare integration in the grocery tech space.
- **Recent Merger Scale**: The 2024 merger with Invafresh combined complementary technologies to create a global leader with deeper R&D and customer support capabilities.

## Strategic Focus
- **Global Expansion**: Expanding reach across 35+ countries, with dedicated sales roles for Europe (Account Executive: Europe currently hiring).
- **Product Innovation**: Launching new modules like Total Store Ordering and predictive analytics for fresh prepared foods.
- **Partnership Ecosystem**: Building strategic integrations with partners like ReposiTrak (traceability) and Inmar Intelligence (marketing/fulfillment) to offer a more comprehensive solution.
- **Customer Growth**: Targeting non-grocery retail segments (convenience stores) and large strategic accounts.
- **Operational Excellence**: New CEO Mike Sanders (appointed April 2025) focused on accelerating customer innovation and operational excellence.

## Why Work Here
- **Growth Trajectory**: High growth phase with 14.3% headcount increase YoY and 111% increase in job postings year-over-year, indicating strong hiring momentum.
- **Global & Remote-Friendly**: Offers remote roles across North America and Europe, with offices in Austin (HQ), Tampa, Mississauga (Canada), and Sweden.
- **Engineering Culture**: Technical team of 52 people (24% of workforce) working with a modern stack including AWS, Kubernetes, React, Python, Databricks, and microservices. Key engineering leaders include Dan Larsson Wåssén (Head of Engineering) and RJ A Seoud (Sr. Director, Engineering Operations).
- **Mission-Driven Work**: Directly impacts food waste reduction, sustainability, and food safety — meaningful work with tangible environmental and social benefits.
- **Diverse Team**: Workforce spans 10 countries with employees from diverse backgrounds; talent sourced from companies like Invafresh, Albertsons, Kaseya, and others.
- **Employee Ratings**: Mixed reviews on Glassdoor (3.1/5.0 overall) with work-life balance rated 2.8/5.0 and culture rated 2.7/5.0 — potential areas for improvement in company culture and work-life balance.
- **Notable Perks**: Not explicitly listed; remote/hybrid flexibility appears available for many roles.

## Sources
1. [Upshop Website](https://upshop.com/)
2. [Upshop About Page](https://upshop.com/about/)
3. [Upshop Careers Page (Greenhouse)](https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/upshop)
4. [Upshop LinkedIn Company Page](https://www.linkedin.com/company/upshopretail)
5. [Business Wire: Upshop Appoints Mike Sanders as CEO](https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20250430916622/en/Upshop-Appoints-Mike-Sanders-as-CEO-to-Accelerate-Customer-Innovation-and-Operational-Excellence)
6. [Business Wire: Upshop Launches Total Store Ordering](https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20250715498817/en/Upshop-Launches-Total-Store-Ordering-to-Optimize-Customer-Service-and-Revenues-while-Ending-the-Fragmentation-of-Grocery-Replenishment)
7. [Business Wire: Upshop and Invafresh Unite to Transform Global Food Retail Technology](https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/upshop-and-invafresh-unite-to-transform-global-food-retail-technology-302192585.html)
8. [Business Wire: Heritage Grocers Group Elevates Fresh Prepared Foods Strategy](https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20250812005899/en/Heritage-Grocers-Group-Elevates-Fresh-Prepared-Foods-Strategy-with-Predictive-Analytics-to-Serve-Diverse-Communities-at-Scale)

## Other roles at Upshop

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- [Customer Support Specialist II](https://feeny.ai/job/customer-support-specialist-ii-upshop-los-angeles-california-united-states-1m4p6qxwpj7y) — Los Angeles California United States Seattle Vancouver, NV
- [Director, Business Operations](https://feeny.ai/job/director-business-operations-upshop-mississauga-kn91sn19r6ay) — Mississauga, Canada
- [Senior Quality Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-quality-engineer-upshop-austin-texas-united-states-miami-florida-united-03k4smtw019r) — Austin Texas United States Miami Florida United States Mississauga Ontario, Canada
- [Implementation Consultant](https://feeny.ai/job/implementation-consultant-upshop-north-t9cztb7pazx2) — North, United States
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- [Solutions Consultant](https://feeny.ai/job/solutions-consultant-upshop-toronto-x93q34vq0r9e) — Toronto, Canada
- [Solutions Consultant](https://feeny.ai/job/solutions-consultant-upshop-austin-j4njx52j1cy7) — Austin, TX