Economist Intern
Boston, MA
Wayfair Inc.
Shop Wayfair for A Zillion Things Home across all styles and budgets. 5,000 brands of furniture, lighting, cookware, and more. Free Shipping on most items.Economist Intern- Summer 2025
Program Dates: June 2 - August 8, 2025
*This is a Boston based opportunity with a 3 day in office expectation*
Who We Are:
Wayfair is looking for economists to tackle difficult empirical problems. Causal inference, empirical IO, and time series modeling, often coupled with principled experimentation, are essential to driving the decision making algorithms that power our core business. We build our systems from the ground up with economic fundamentals in mind.
You will be part of the Pricing, Profitability, Demand Forecasting team, consisting of ~20 full time economists and ML scientists. We are a close knit science team, with a lively economist/science community with quarterly hack-a-ton, weekly reading groups in causal inference/forecasting/ML. We work in close collaboration with engineering, data science, and product teams as well as with commercial teams and opportunity to influence company strategies. The team builds key science components for many of our pricing, market design, finance, and operations systems. Our Economist role has 3 different skill sets:
- Reduced Form Causal Analysis
- Empirical Industrial Organization
- Time Series/Forecasting
This year, we are hiring interns specifically within our Reduced Form Causal Analysis and Empirical IO functions. We will ask you to specify the skill set you rate yourself highest on our application, and will focus our interviews accordingly.
You will have the opportunity to play a critical role in a growing company while also operating with a high level of executive visibility. The team is focused on creating strategic solutions that steer customer and supplier behavior and influence key decision making. Our employees enjoy an environment of strong ownership and quick feedback from building, experimenting and iterating on high-impact work.
What You’ll Do:
- Help us price millions of products in a complex, two-sided marketplace.
- Measure the demand response to various business decisions, using both observational and experimental methods.
- Address a variety of supply-side questions, such as assessing supplier responses to changes in the design of our marketplace.
- Forecast demand and costs at scale using a combination of time series and machine learning techniques.
What You’ll Need:
Basic Qualifications:
- Currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Economics or a closely-related field (e.g., Marketing, Finance, Operations Research, Statistics) with the expectation that degree will be obtained between December 2025 and Summer 2026 with a 3.0 GPA minimum
- Must be returning to the course of study following completion of the internship.
- Ability to commit to working 40 hours/week (9am-5pm, Monday-Friday) from June 2 - August 8, 2025 in our Boston office.
Preferred Qualifications:
- Background in one of the following fields is preferred: applied microeconomics (e.g. labor, public, development, behavioral, experimental, household finance), empirical industrial organization, quantitative marketing, econometrics.
- Proficiency in Python
- Experience with SQL
- Hands-on experience with big datasets
- Appetite for collaborating in a highly interdisciplinary environment with other social scientists, computer scientists, statisticians, operations researchers, and engineers.
- Passion for communicating complex material in a concise and precise way.
Wayfair Internship Program
Our Summer Internship Program is a paid, full-time program in our Boston, Massachusetts office for 10 weeks, June 2-August 8. No matter who you are, we want Wayfair to be a place where you feel at home. We offer high impact-projects, mentorship, and community-building activities to all of our interns. Throughout the program, we provide interns with the opportunity to engage in social and community building activities including:
- A calendar of intern events including social networking, professional development and a leadership dialogue series
- Formalized mentorship program along with an assigned reporting manager for impactful professional development and feedback
- Skills-based training
- Dialogue events with senior leaders to provide a holistic view of all functions at Wayfair
- Coffee chat opportunities for interns to get to know one another
- Volunteer opportunities
- Intern-wide innovation project designed to teach interns skills for handling ambiguous business problems
- Intern Appreciation Day celebration
- Events throughout Boston which allow interns to explore what the city has to offer including a Red Sox game, and Boston Harbor boat cruise.
Wayfair’s In Office Expectations:
An Important Note about Wayfair's In-Office Policy:
All Boston-based interns, co-ops, and corporate employees will be in office in a hybrid capacity. Employees will work in the office on designated days Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, and work remotely Monday and Friday.
Massachusetts Applicants: I understand that it is unlawful in Massachusetts to require or administer a lie detector test as a condition of employment or continued employment. An employer who violates this law shall be subject to criminal penalties and civil liability.
Equal Employment Opportunity - inclusive of the following;
Assistance for Individuals with Disabilities
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About Wayfair Inc.
About Wayfair Inc.
Wayfair is one of the world’s largest online destinations for the home. Whether you work in our global headquarters in Boston or Berlin, or in our warehouses or offices throughout the world, we’re reinventing the way people shop for their homes. Through our commitment to industry-leading technology and creative problem-solving, we are confident that Wayfair will be home to the most rewarding work of your career. If you’re looking for rapid growth, constant learning, and dynamic challenges, then you’ll find that amazing career opportunities are knocking.
No matter who you are, Wayfair is a place you can call home. We’re a community of innovators, risk-takers, and trailblazers who celebrate our differences, and know that our unique perspectives make us stronger, smarter, and well-positioned for success. We value and rely on the collective voices of our employees, customers, community, and suppliers to help guide us as we build a better Wayfair – and world – for all. Every voice, every perspective matters. That’s why we’re proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, ethnicity, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship status, marital status, disability, gender identity, gender expression, veteran status, genetic information, or any other legally protected characteristic.
Your personal data is processed in accordance with our Candidate Privacy Notice (https://www.wayfair.com/careers/privacy). If you have any questions or wish to exercise your rights under applicable privacy and data protection laws, please contact us at dataprotectionofficer@wayfair.com.
Tags: Causal inference Econometrics Economics Engineering Finance Industrial Machine Learning Privacy Python Research SQL Statistics
Perks/benefits: Career development Home office stipend Startup environment Team events
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