Senior Data Analyst, Retention Analytics
Tovala
Data Science, IT
Chicago, IL, USA
Posted on Aug 30, 2025
We’re Tovala, a food-tech company reinventing home cooking to save consumers time. Through an innovative combination of hardware, software, and fresh food delivery, we make it incredibly simple for anyone to prepare and enjoy delicious, home-cooked meals without sacrificing time to do whatever matters to them. Through our superior technology, product experience and food quality, we have separated Tovala from the busy pack of other meal delivery businesses. In the process, we’ve amassed a loyal, rapidly growing following and our retention, product engagement and customer NPS are all best-in-class. We’ve raised over $100mm from great investors like Left Lane Capital, Origin Ventures, Y Combinator and Comcast Ventures and have invested strongly in building a unique culture that fosters growth, personal development and camaraderie.
Position Summary
At Tovala, we eat data for breakfast… along with our delicious biscuits. Our team is a small group of analysts and engineers who are passionate about helping teams across the Tovala organization make data-driven decisions.
We are looking for a Senior Data Analyst to lead Retention Analytics, focusing on understanding, forecasting, and improving how customers engage with Tovala over time. The ideal candidate combines analytical rigor with a deep curiosity about customer behavior, always asking why customers act the way they do and how we can better serve them. This person will be a key partner for our Lifecycle Marketing (LCM), Demand Planning, Finance, and Product teams, helping them answer critical questions such as:
• What drives customer retention?
• How can we design initiatives to improve it?
• How much future demand will our customers generate?
This role will build and sustain a retention analytics ecosystem: generating and validating hypotheses, modeling potential outcomes, measuring performance against expectations, and using insights to generate new hypotheses. They will own core analytics products such as retention models, churn predictions, and demand forecasts – ensuring these tools are actionable, trusted, and accessible for business stakeholders.
How you will spend your time at Tovala
- Lead Tovala’s retention analytics ecosystem in partnership with Marketing and Product teams: frame hypotheses, validate through A/B testing and analysis, model scenarios to predict impact, and measure outcomes to feed learnings back into the ecosystem.
- Own retention models and demand forecasts by building churn/retention models that predict customer behavior and translating insights to inform operational decisions and financial forecasts.
- Design and steward analytics products as product owner for retention-related tools, ensuring usability, adoption, and scalability in partnership with data engineering.
- Deliver insights that drive decisions by exploring the data warehouse with SQL, uncovering cohort and behavioral trends, and communicating results through compelling data stories and decision frameworks.
- Contribute as a leader on the analytics team by driving projects from ideation to implementation and promoting sustainable, high-quality data practices.
About you
- Analytics expertise: You bring 5+ years of experience in data analytics, ideally focused on retention, lifecycle marketing, or customer behavior. You are highly proficient in SQL and comfortable navigating large-scale data warehouses (Snowflake experience a plus).
- Experimentation and modeling: You have hands-on experience with A/B testing, experiment design, and campaign measurement, and you’re comfortable applying modeling and simulation techniques to evaluate strategic alternatives.
- Decision influence: You excel at turning complex data into clear, actionable insights that shape business decisions. You understand not just what the data says, but what it means for the business.
- Business partnership: You have proven experience working directly with marketing, product, or operations teams, translating business needs into analyses, forecasts, and decision frameworks.
- Project and product ownership: You have strong project management skills with the ability to balance quick-turn analyses and scalable analytics product development.
- Bonus points: You have familiarity with BI tools (Sigma, Looker, Tableau, etc.), Python or R, version control (e.g. Git), demand forecasting methods, or decision analysis frameworks.
Compensation / Benefits
Tovala uses market data, geography, and placement of internal employees to determine salary. Additionally, we offer all employees real ownership in the company in the form of a competitive equity package.
• Flexible paid time off (with a minimum of 15 days off you HAVE to take) (change if hourly or production)
• Comprehensive healthcare coverage we really invest in
• 401k with match
• Free Tovala Smart Oven and discounted Tovala meals Paid holidays and our winter holiday office shutdown where the offices and facilities close for a week around Christmas and New Years
• Various other perks - recognition programs, continued learning stipend, casual dress code, in-office coffee, snacks and drinks, and Tovala swag
The values we hold dear
Put the team first
We put what is best for the broader team ahead of what is best for ourselves or our immediate department.
Get s#!t done (well)
We celebrate people at all levels for delivering high impact work that expands the bounds of what we’re able to do.
Connect the dots
We engage with curiosity to learn how our work impacts others so that we can problem-solve holistically and work collaboratively.
Be Direct
We share our perspective openly and directly, even when it feels difficult to do so.
Embrace the obstacles
We rise to meet challenges with a sense of urgency, resolve, and optimism.
Champion the customer
We consider and prioritize our customer in all of our decisions
At Tovala we‘re committed to building a workplace that represents a variety of backgrounds, skills, and perspectives and do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. Everyone is welcome here!