Christopher Sanders Email & Phone Number

New York, Ny, Us

New York, New York, United States

Built the first demand forecasting platform at Syrup, a Series A SaaS startup backed by Accel and Google's Gradient Ventures. Led a team of six full-stack data scientists and created the product vision, BRD, roadmap, and OKRs. Spearheaded the launch of Syrup's automated MLOps forecasting architecture, introducing its first neural network model and a guardrail exception-handling system. At the fast-paced Series A, I wore multiple hats, developing the company's first cross-functional quarterly planning process and supporting sales, customer success, and marketing teams with product marketing materials, solutions architecture, and customer support.• Defined comprehensive product vision, BRD, roadmap, and metrics for Syrup's forecasting platform, ensuring alignment with accuracy goals and customer impact• Launched Syrup's first neural network model (LDSM) for fashion demand planning, achieving performance comparable to existing gradient-boosted trees model in just 8 weeks• Collaborated closely with GTM and product marketing teams on go-to-market campaigns, supporting sales on customer calls and RFPs, while creating definitive forecasting product documentation• Reduced customer forecast onboarding time by 50% through launch of first demand forecast platform, enabling custom forecasts via shared MLOps infrastructure• Implemented ML forecast guardrails that reduced forecast defects from 15% to zero and improved allocation accuracy by 50% through strategic post-processing rules• Led extensive data science experimentation, executing 100+ experiments improving RMSSE by 10% through testing of new data sources, enhanced features, and advanced model architectures• Developed customer-facing analytics dashboard that saved 208 support hours annually by enabling self-serve forecast accuracy analysis• Created and implemented Syrup's first cross-functional quarterly roadmap planning process, coordinating across marketing, sales, customer success, and leadership teams

New York City Metropolitan Area

Launched multi-period, mixed-integer optimization model-based product to provide Amazon vendors visibility to future order quantity with flexibility to respond to evolving demand forecast and network conditions. Led an 18-person cross-functional team of engineers, research scientists, PMs and BIEs to execute roadmap for the multi-period, mixed-integer inventory optimization model, data pipelines, orchestration microservices, and UIs. Owned WW technical and business stakeholder relationships.• Led GTM and sales, generating $23M in free cash flow savings in first 6 months, 10% of entitlement, by scaling from 6 to 257 vendors in the US and EU in 2022, increasing vendor confirmation rates by 1300bps.• Onboarded three associate PMs and two BIEs to product team. Implemented ASANA kanban management system to organize and orchestrate PM team priorities and tasks.• Wrote product vision doc, associated BRD and roadmap to re-architect Amazon's commitment ordering ecosystem from four disparate legacy prototypes to a single unified commitment ordering platform, compatible with various multi-period optimization models.• Built OKRs and operational metrics, in partnership with BIE team, to measure commitment ordering system and business performance. Reduced system ordering defects by 1000 bps by implementing tech solutions.• Built customer-facing Analytics dashboard, enabling internal retail customers to deep dive and execute business analytics self-serve. Reducing PM and Engineering support hours by 208 hours annually.• Pitched Retail Leadership and Secured an incremental investment of 10 SDEs to accelerate commitment product, following a pilot with six large US-based CPG brands .• Interviewed 15 of Amazon's largest consumables vendors. Identified advance visibility to Amazon order quantity as primary opportunity to reduce vendor cost to serve and increase access to supply.

Seattle, Washington

Built machine learning and statistical models (DeepAR model, AFT model, custom neural net, and heuristic models) to generate billions of vendor lead time and supply availability predictions every day. These services helped Amazon customers make more informed purchasing decisions and manage Amazon's $1B out-of-stock business. Led a 10-person cross-functional data-science engineering team owning a suite of microservices, data pipelines, statistical, ML and heuristic models, and UIs. Owned WW business stakeholder relationships. • Partnered with Applied Science and Engineering teams to launch SCOT sourcing's first neural net to predict PO arrival dates, used to make customer-facing website promises.• Owned business metrics to measure OOSP systems and model impact on promise accuracy, identifying an opportunity to improve missed promises by 25% due to unconstrained backorder quantities.• Launched a system to limit customer backorders using a Sagemaker DeepAR-based ML model that predicts available supplier quantities, reducing missed promises by 25%.• Developed and oversaw COVID-19 supply constraint response of OOSP systems, coordinating customer website messaging and backorder strategy with Senior Retail leaders.

Greater Seattle Area

Led GTM and annual vendor cost negotiations for the US Direct Import program, enabling Amazon to purchase products from vendors' overseas factories. Gathered requirements and influenced tech roadmaps. • Spearheaded GTM strategy for nine Amazon retail teams delivering $125M in cashflow savings, +31% YoY, working across a large stakeholder group including software, operations, and business teams.• Developed a Product Cost negotiation tool to generate recommended product costs by using profitability and product cost analysis, generating $22M in annualized FCF during 2017 Annual Vendor Negotiations.• Partnered with cross-functional transportation and supply chain tech teams to ensure Q4 capacity prioritization plans. Resulted in 99.9% of all Q4 shipments being received on time for Black Friday sales.

Greater Seattle Area

Managed and oversaw the operations, marketing, and P&L for two home improvement strategic vendors. Led GTM activities for HI's direct important program. • Partnered with vendors to implement marketing and supply chain performance improvements resulting in topline growth of 38% YoY and 46% respectively, compared to respective categories' 23% and 27%.• Led HI direct import GTM strategy, onboarding $9MM of DI COGs, helping to grow HI's import business by 233% YoY, and deliver $2.7MM in cashflow savings.

Greater Minneapolis-St. Paul Area

Managed the operations and supply chain for Target's $600MM dollar iTunes and Prepaid Gift Card Business. • Owned inventory strategy for gift card products delivering 50% YoY year growth for business.• Executed highest-grossing iTunes promotion ever, earning 36% of June 2014's total US market share.• Launched new gift card fixture across Target's 1800 stores, forecasted to result in $18MM in sales upside.

Executive Mba

B.S., Industrial And Labor Relations

Activities and Societies: Sigma Chi- President of the Alpha Phi Chapter, Interfraternity Council President's special taskforce member