Why RealCold?
Established in 2022, RealCold was founded to address the unmet needs of the food cold chain sector. By combining high-growth strategic locations, state-of-the-art facilities, and exhaustive offerings that include traditional storage programs and diverse value-added services (including DTC), the company has positioned itself as a collaborative and integrated provider for food retailers, producers, and distributors. This mission is reinforced through its highly bespoke solutioning and customer-centric approach. The RealCold platform operates a national, omni-channel network, inclusive traditional storage offerings, as well as comprehensive direct-to-consumer program, which can reach the majority of U.S. consumers within 1- or 2-day ground service. For more information on RealCold, please visit www.realcold.com.
Role Overview:
RealCold is seeking a Director of Business Analytics to build the analytical capabilities, data foundations, and next-generation systems that will shape how the company operates and makes decisions.
This is not a traditional reporting role. The Director of Business Analytics will work deeply across operational processes, source systems, enterprise data platforms, and business workflows to understand how data is created, transformed, and used. The role will identify gaps in data quality and process consistency, architect durable solutions, and translate complex operational information into clear, actionable guidance for leaders across the organization.
The ideal candidate combines the technical depth of a data architect, the curiosity of an analyst, the practicality of an operator, and the executive presence of a strategic advisor. This person must be comfortable moving between SQL queries, warehouse processes, dashboard design, AI strategy, customer conversations, and executive presentations.
Essential Functions and Key Responsibilities:
Data Discovery, Analysis, Architecture, and Process Design
- Trace data from its point of creation within warehouse and operational systems through ETL pipelines, data lakes, enterprise platforms, and reporting layers.
- Develop a detailed understanding of how operational processes generate data and where inconsistent practices create quality gaps, incomplete records, or unreliable metrics.
- Conduct deep analysis across warehouse operations, customer activity, labor, inventory, productivity, service performance, and financial outcomes.
- Design scalable data models, architectures, workflows, and governance practices that improve data reliability and usability.
- Partner with operations, technology, finance, customer teams, and functional leaders to redesign processes that strengthen data integrity at the source.
- Influence teams across the organization to adopt more consistent processes, definitions, and data practices.
- Establish clear business logic, metric definitions, and data lineage for critical enterprise KPIs.
- Identify root causes rather than simply reporting symptoms.
- Architect resilient systems that can support current analytical needs while preparing the organization for AI-enabled workflows, automated ingestion, and agentic applications.
Actionable Dashboards and Analytical Products
- Design and deliver dashboards that help users understand what happened, why it happened, and what action should be taken.
- Move the organization beyond static reporting toward decision-support tools that surface risks, opportunities, exceptions, and recommended areas of focus.
- Build analytical products for general managers, operational leaders, executives, customers, and other stakeholders.
- Develop intuitive visualizations for critical KPIs such as labor productivity, inventory accuracy, throughput, occupancy, order performance, service quality, and customer profitability.
- Ensure dashboards are trusted, scalable, well-documented, and tied to clearly defined business processes.
- Evaluate dashboard adoption and continuously improve analytical products based on how users make decisions.
Insights and Value Delivery
- Translate data into practical insights that help general managers and functional leaders improve operational and financial performance.
- Identify the key levers that drive productivity, service, labor efficiency, customer value, and profitability.
- Communicate complex findings in clear, concise, and understandable terms for both technical and nontechnical audiences.
Next-Generation Data and AI Strategy
- Help define and execute RealCold’s long-term strategy for enterprise analytics, artificial intelligence, and intelligent automation.
- Design systems that are optimized for AI workflows, agentic ingestion, semantic retrieval, automated analysis, and decision support.
- Identify practical AI use cases across warehouse operations, customer service, forecasting, labor management, commercial functions, and enterprise processes.
- Evaluate and implement AI tools that improve the speed, quality, and accessibility of analysis.
- Prototype emerging solutions and determine where experimentation can be converted into scalable business capabilities.
Key Responsibilities
- Serve as a strategic partner to senior executives, general managers, operational leaders, and customer-facing teams.
- Build a comprehensive understanding of RealCold’s operational processes, technology ecosystem, data flows, and analytical needs.
- Lead complex cross-functional initiatives involving data architecture, process improvement, analytics, and technology.
- Establish standards for data quality, analytical design, metric consistency, and insight delivery.
- Develop trusted relationships with stakeholders and use influence to drive process and behavioral change.
- Represent RealCold externally in customer discussions involving analytics, data integration, reporting, and technology capabilities.
Requirements of the Position:
- Bachelor’s degree in data science, Computer Science, Mathematics, Statistics, Economics.
- Minimum five (5) years of experience in business analytics, data architecture, data engineering, operational analytics, or a related field.
- Significant experience with Warehouse Management Systems (WMS), with strong preference to Blue Yonder or Extensiv.
Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities:
- Advanced SQL skills, including the ability to investigate complex data structures, validate logic, identify anomalies, and develop scalable data models.
- Experience with enterprise data platforms such as Snowflake, Databricks, or comparable technologies.
- Strong knowledge of ETL processes, data orchestration, & data transformation.
- Experience designing executive, operational, and customer-facing dashboards.
- Demonstrated ability to identify business insights and translate analysis into operational or financial value.
- Familiarity with modern AI tools, intelligent agents, and AI-ready data architecture.
- Proven ability to lead through influence across technical, operational, and executive stakeholder groups.
- Excellent written, verbal, and presentation skills.
- Ability to synthesize technical and operational complexity into clear recommendations and compelling business narratives.
- Experience in Python for data analysis, automation, integration, modeling, or application development.
- Experience working with complex operational data, ideally within logistics, warehousing, supply chain, manufacturing, retail, or another process-intensive environment.
- Able to stay focused on solutions that work in real operating environments.
- Willing and able to personally investigate data, write queries, build prototypes, and work through detailed operational issues.
- Energized by building capabilities in a growing organization where processes, platforms, and requirements continue to evolve.
- Motivated to understand how the business truly works and unwilling to accept surface-level explanations.
- Capable of driving process change across teams without relying solely on formal authority.
- Able to connect individual analyses and technology decisions to broader enterprise objectives.
- Confident and credible when interacting with senior leadership and external customers.
Work Requirements:
- Must be able to pass a background check.
- Ability to work well under pressure.
- Fully remote with overnight travel up to 10%
Work Environment:
Works in a cold storage company with occasional exposure to low to below-zero temperatures. This job may involve occasional exposure to some disagreeable elements such as dust, noise, etc. Accidents are improbable other than minor injuries. The environment may be fast paced at times. You may occasionally be working around moving machines, order pickers, and forklifts.
Physical Requirements:
This is not an all-inclusive list, but it is intended to give an overview physical requirement for this position. Reasonable accommodation will be provided under appropriate circumstances and in accordance with applicable law. While performing the duties of this job, the employee is regularly required to:
- Continually: Sit for extended periods of time
- Continually: Speak and hear
- Continually: Type, write, and read
RealCold is an Equal Employment Opportunity Employer. We believe in providing employment opportunities to all Team Members and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws.
