THE TEAM• ~160 people, around half in engineering, product and data
• 45+ advanced degrees across computer science, mathematics and operations research
• Thousands of data points captured, calculated, analysed and predicted for every single parcel we handle
• An intellectually vibrant culture of first‑principles thinking, tight feedback loops and relentless experimentation
Relay is a parcel delivery network. Every night, parcels from online retailers arrive at our sort centres, are sorted into delivery routes, and go out the next day with couriers. Two things have to go right for that to work.
Routing is the planning side: software that decides, before parcels have even arrived, which ones to expect, how to group them into routes, and how to make those routes efficient for couriers to drive. Sortation is the physical side: warehouse teams and sorting robots turning a building full of parcels into neatly separated routes, thousands of times a night.
The two are tightly coupled. If the plan expects a parcel that never arrives, a courier’s route has a hole in it. If the warehouse sorts a parcel the plan didn’t expect, it has nowhere to go. This role owns the analytics across both: spotting when either side is off, working out why, and building the case for what to change.
Your work splits between a daily operational rhythm (is the network healthy this morning, and if not, why) and deeper investigations (what is driving cost, where is the plan falling short of what’s possible, what should we change). Your analysis won’t sit in a dashboard waiting to be discovered - it will change which parcels get planned for, how warehouse shifts are scheduled, and where the operation focuses its improvement efforts.
Relay operates a centralised data team of around 30 data engineers, analysts, and data scientists, with analysts embedded into teams across the business. You will sit with the Routing & Sortation teams but report into the central data team, working daily with software engineers, warehouse operations, commercial, and finance.