About the job
Company Alaska Airlines
**The Team
**
Guided by our purpose, core values, and leadership principles, we are creating an airline people love. Our corporate teams set the strategies and operational plans to ensure the success of our company. Whether we use our expertise in accounting, human resources, finance, planning, legal, marketing, or any of our operational divisions, our shared passion for travel and our guests is what motivates us to achieve excellence each day. If you share our passion for creating an airline people love, we want to hear from you.
**Role Summary
**
Lead and develop the Operations Research (OR) team within Revenue Strategy & Optimization at Alaska Air Group (AAG), ensuring delivery of high-quality optimization tools, applications, and models supporting Revenue Management, Pricing, Scheduling, and Network Planning. Balance technical credibility with people leadership—setting clear expectations, managing performance, coaching for development, protecting team capacity, and translating strategy into tactical actions that leverage science and technology to deliver practical and immediate revenue and profit outcomes.
**Key Duties
**
- Manage performance of OR team members: set clear expectations, provide timely constructive feedback and coaching, and create a clear accountability structure, managing people more than tasks.
- Ensure accuracy, rigor, and ability to inform decisions in optimization models, tools, and analyses delivered to Revenue Management, Pricing, Scheduling, and Network Planning.
- Create the bridge between function strategy and clear tactical actions for the team, protecting team capacity and managing priorities, tradeoffs, and escalations.
- Translate business problems from Revenue Management, Pricing, Scheduling, and Network Planning into well-scoped optimization projects, coordinating project intake, prioritization, and resource allocation.
- Establish and enforce standards and best practices in analytic and engineering processes: code review, documentation, version control, model validation, and production monitoring.
- Understand team members individually, actively coach and help them achieve career goals, and focus on building capability—not only delivering output; own hiring, onboarding, training, and cross-training plans.
- Maintain a player-coach mentality with hands-on programming and model development more frequently than the Director, contributing regularly to the team’s codebase and optimization work while balancing people leadership.
- Establish priorities, delegate, and lead the team’s daily/weekly work, making decisions and recommendations as appropriate, understanding and managing to business metrics, and balancing short- and long-term needs on a 6–12 month horizon.
- Build trust and credibility with the team, foster healthy team culture with open two-way communication, listen with intent, and manage and mediate conflicts.
- Demonstrate deep curiosity—actively seek out emerging optimization techniques, ML advancements, and industry innovations to keep the team at the cutting edge.
**Job-Specific Experience, Education & Skills
Required
**
- 5 years of experience in operational research, data science, industrial engineering, applied mathematics, or related area.
- 2 years of leadership experience.
- Bachelor’s degree in operations research, industrial engineering, mathematics, statistics, computer science, or related field, or an additional 2 years of relevant training/experience in lieu of this degree.
- Strong technical fluency in mathematical optimization, simulation, machine learning, and statistical modeling—sufficient to review, guide, and quality-check the team’s work.
- Proficiency with Python, SQL, and modern data science/optimization tools.
- Demonstrated experience managing complex projects and leading technical teams; proven ability to manage competing priorities, protect team capacity, and deliver results under pressure.
- Adept at communications and presentations to both technical and non-technical audiences; able to explain complex technical concepts to senior leadership.
- Tenacious, resilient, optimistic, open-minded, curious, data-driven, and comfortable in a fast-paced environment with a laser focus on driving outcomes.
- High school diploma or equivalent is required.
- Minimum age of 18.
- Must be authorized to work in the U.S.
**Preferred
**
- Master’s or Ph.D. in Operations Research, Industrial Engineering, or another quantitative field.
- Experience in commercial aviation or complex logistics and revenue optimization.
- Experience with Agile development and productionizing ML/optimization models.
- Experience with Azure cloud environment, Databricks, and/or MLflow.
**Job-Specific Leadership Expectations
**
- Embody our values to own safety, do the right thing, be caring and kind, and deliver performance.
- Promote, and be a role model for, a culture of safety at all times; shape inclusive team culture; continuously interrupt bias.
- Provide timely feedback and manage performance; foster an environment supporting timely two-way communication.
- Effectively lead change; connect team members to internal and external networks needed to accomplish work and support career development.
**Salary Range
**
$149,600 - $224,400 / year