Senior Data Science Analyst - OptimusAI

Who You'll Work With

Driving lasting impact and building long-term capabilities with our clients is not easy work. You are the kind of person who thrives in a high performance/high reward culture - doing hard things, picking yourself up when you stumble, and having the resilience to try another way forward.

In return for your drive, determination, and curiosity, we'll provide the resources, mentorship, and opportunities you need to become a stronger leader faster than you ever thought possible. Your colleagues—at all levels—will invest deeply in your development, just as much as they invest in delivering exceptional results for clients. Every day, you'll receive apprenticeship, coaching, and exposure that will accelerate your growth in ways you won’t find anywhere else.

When you join us, you will have:

• Continuous learning: Our learning and apprenticeship culture, backed by structured programs, is all about helping you grow while creating an environment where feedback is clear, actionable, and focused on your development. The real magic happens when you take the input from others to heart and embrace the fast-paced learning experience, owning your journey.
• A voice that matters: From day one, we value your ideas and contributions. You’ll make a tangible impact by offering innovative ideas and practical solutions, all while upholding our unwavering commitment to ethics and integrity. We not only encourage diverse perspectives, but they are critical in driving us toward the best possible outcomes.
• Global community: With colleagues across 65+ countries and over 100 different nationalities, our firm’s diversity fuels creativity and helps us come up with the best solutions for our clients. Plus, you’ll have the opportunity to learn from exceptional colleagues with diverse backgrounds and experiences.
• World-class benefits: On top of a competitive salary (based on your location, experience, and skills), we provide a comprehensive benefits package to enable holistic well-being for you and your family.

Your Impact

As a Data Science Specialist, you’ll collaborate in a dynamic, multi-disciplinary team of 3–6 experts, using your creativity and analytics expertise to drive client performance in areas like energy efficiency, product quality, and capacity. You’ll work side-by-side with client process engineers and analytics specialists, presenting your insights directly to executive audiences.

Internally, you’ll partner with our talented product engineers to develop innovative products and algorithms that address both current and future client needs. You’ll play a key role in codifying best practices, amplifying our impact both inside and outside the firm, and shaping the product roadmap.

You’ll be based in our Brussels office as part of McKinsey’s manufacturing AI solution, OptimusAI, which sits at the intersection of three practices: Global Energy and Materials, QuantumBlack, and Operations.

Global Energy and Materials: Advises production and investor companies across chemicals & agriculture, paper & packaging, metals & mining, oil & gas, and power generation on strategic, operational, and growth issues.

QuantumBlack, AI by McKinsey: The AI arm of our firm, helping clients transform faster, innovate smarter, and anticipate the future.

Operations: Assists clients in solving complex operational challenges by developing and implementing strategies and solutions for their most critical problems—connecting boardroom strategies to shop floor operators.

At the intersection of these groups, OptimusAI is a team of ~10 expert consultants, data scientists, and engineers focused on improving processing plant productivity through data analytics. We develop real-time AI advisory systems to support decision making in plant control rooms, optimize process control systems, and unlock plant bottlenecks through data-driven process changes.

OptimusAI also supports a global community of consultants by developing an innovative machine learning toolkit and codifying our approach to deliver significant and lasting client impact.

You’ll benefit from world-class training in business problem structuring and client advisory, working closely with senior manufacturing and analytics experts. Experience unparalleled career growth, with significant ownership and responsibility from day one, all within a collaborative, diverse, and non-hierarchical environment. Plus, seize the opportunity to travel to client sites—locally and around the world.

There is a flexibility to hire at different role level, depending on your experience.

Your Qualifications and Skills

Required:

• Undergraduate degree
• Production-quality Python for model development, including optimization, time series forecasting, feature engineering, backtesting, and evaluation using standard DS toolkits (e.g., pandas, scikit-learn, statsmodels, gradient boosting, etc.)
• Familiarity with pytest and reproducible research workflow; experience operationalizing models: versioned experiments, CI/CD, model monitoring and drift detection, and collaboration with engineering on APIs and model/solution design
• Experience applying advanced analytical and statistical methods to solve business problems involving commodity markets
• Ability to explain commodity market nuances and/or complex analytics approaches and results in layman’s terms to executive audiences across commodity trading, operations, supply chain / logistics, and finance / accounting functions

Preferred experience (all not expected):

• Advanced degree in a quantitative discipline (computer science, applied mathematics, economics, quantitative finance, engineering) or equivalent practitioner experience
• 2+ years’ experience in commodity markets developing market research, trading, or hedging/risk management strategies such as netback/deal economics, signal backtesting, stress testing, and/or hedge effectiveness
• 2+ years’ experience in physical/cash markets of metals, power/electricity markets, natural gas, crude oil, refined products, and/or ocean freight
• 2+ years’ experience applying time series analysis of mean-reverting and cointegrated commodity prices/premiums (e.g., ARIMA, VECM, GARCH), supervised learning (e.g., SVM, LSTM, parallel or sequential tree-based models), unsupervised learning (e.g., PCA, K-means clustering), optimization (e.g., LP/MILP and stochastic models), and/or NLP sentiment analysis
• 6+ months’ experience with LLM-based analytics in enterprise settings (e.g., document/comms extraction, RAG, evaluation/guardrails)
• Experience integrating data science and/or automation workflows with CTRM/ETRM systems via API
• Experience automating middle/back-office processes with PRA and LLMs (e.g., pre-trade KYC/credit, trade execution, compliance, logistics, trade settlement)