Lead Merchandising Operations Analyst

BJ's Wholesale Club•Marlborough, MA

1d•$103,000 - $131,500•Hybrid

About The Position

Merchandising at BJ's drives the assortment, presentation, and value story that defines the member experience across every club. Merchandising Operations translates that strategy into execution — owning space allocation, assortment planning, and the planograms that shape how products are presented on the floor. This role supports two of the most visible and commercially important areas of the club: Center Core and High Value Space (HVS). Center Core is our General Merchandise destination, a curated space built around seasonal, holiday, and high-interest categories, designed to reinforce BJ's as a source of value and newness across giftable, décor, and impulse categories. High Value Space (HVS) encompasses the club's highest-traffic locations — entrance, end caps, and checkout — and serves as the primary vehicle for seasonal and promotional storytelling. The entrance sets the first impression and establishes the tone for key events. End caps connect in-aisle assortment to broader themes, drive basket-building through attachment and cross-sell, and introduce new or seasonally relevant items. Checkout captures last-minute impulse with high-margin product, maximizing lane productivity while reinforcing everyday value. The Lead Analyst is the primary analytical and reporting partner for both areas, operating at the intersection of category strategy, space productivity, and data infrastructure. The role carries a dual mandate: serve as a trusted analytical voice for Center Core and HVS decision-making, while simultaneously advancing the broader Merchandising reporting and analytics capability. Neither area has robust data infrastructure today, creating genuine greenfield opportunity to define metrics, build dashboards, and shape the analytical foundation that will drive decisions across the business. This is a high-visibility role for someone who can move between hands-on data work and clear, credible communication with cross-functional partners and leadership. Organizationally, the role sits within Merchandising Operations with dotted-line relationships into the Center Core/HVS team and the broader Merchant organization.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree in Business, Finance, Economics, Mathematics, Statistics, or a related field.
5–10 years of experience in merchandising analytics, category management, retail operations, or a related field.
Strong proficiency with Excel, SQL, and BI tools (Power BI, Tableau, or similar); exposure to Databricks and SAP a plus. Comfortable working through large or messy datasets independently.
Demonstrated ability to synthesize ambiguous data into clear, actionable recommendations with minimal guidance.
Strong communicator — able to build relationships, ask the right questions to surface the true business need, and present findings in terms that resonate with both analytical and non-analytical audiences.
Strong project management skills, with the ability to manage multiple high-impact initiatives simultaneously.

Nice To Haves

General retail experience preferred; wholesale/club-channel and promotional analytics experience a plus.

Responsibilities

Serve as the primary analytical partner to the Center Core, HVS, and Merchant teams — translating business questions into analytical approaches and delivering insights that inform assortment, space, and promotional decisions.
Lead discovery on ambiguous or unclear questions, working through surface-level symptoms to identify root causes before making a recommendation.
Analyze category performance, space productivity, and promotional effectiveness to surface opportunities and risks; advise on strategies that optimize sales, margin, and member value.
Monitor performance against forecasts, flagging gaps early and recommending adjustments to assortment, space, or execution.
Build and own the reporting and insights infrastructure for Center Core and HVS — defining the metrics, dashboards, and analytical frameworks that will drive category and space decisions going forward.
Identify and access certified data from the right sources across a fragmented environment — navigating systems that are not co-located or consistently governed to ensure recommendations are built on reliable inputs.
Maintain consistent standards for data sourcing, validation, and documentation across all analyses, with a strong bias toward integrity before escalating findings.
Contribute to the broader Merchandising analytics program — participating in requirements gathering, helping define metrics and reporting standards, and informing the roadmap for expanded BI and AI-enabled capabilities across the organization.
Research and evaluate analytical methodologies relevant to incrementality, space productivity, and category performance — drawing on work from the Merchandising Analytics team, industry best practices, and third-party frameworks — and assess their applicability to Center Core and HVS.
Support data certification and governance efforts in partnership with the central data and analytics team, helping establish SLAs, metric definitions, and access frameworks that the broader merchandising organization can trust.