ML Engineer (X3) -> Staff Data Scientist (X5)

I had ownership of 3 projects at Walmart.

The first allowed me to navigate and make waves within the company till it reached and got support from the CEO . The project was a huge success and the amount of money we saved helped fund several other projects. it also led me to become and Franz Edelman award laureate and publish my first scientific research paper. Though it was a mix of RL and optimization

The second required me to tackle a unique problem with several moving parts. Inappropriate content detection. There was no literature on this or a solution, which is why I wracked my brains on this project for 6 months and now I have a patent in the process or filing. I built a multi-processed data crawling and self-labelling pipeline that encompasses a lot of NLP and Vision concepts and ensemble them to build a classier to review or block user generated content on online marketplace.

The third project enabled me to understand the scaling aspect of ML models. Building pipelines and automating the DAGs for several projects on Google cloud using airflow. This was done for the Apparel department where the scale of items being sold increased way more due to seasonal items and different color and size distributions.

The line between Data science, ML has always been blurry and it might take years for the industry to have a consensus on the division, that’s why i positioned myself in a way that allowed me to gain experience in all aspects of both these roles. Thanks to my stellar work accomplishments and consistent top performer rating, I was promoted twice in a span of 2 years and moved up to a Staff Data Scientist role at age 28

On a final note, I was hoping I could say something I had two goals in this text

• First was to sufficiently impress the reader and show them that I’m capable of brainstorming and arriving at solutions
• The second was to demonstrate understanding of having an impact.

Now I’m sure it must sound weird that a generation of 20 somethings out of university all want to have impact on something, and I admit, this concept eluded me for a while. When I say I want to have an impact, I mean I’m looking for a challenge. Tackling unsolved problems , that’s my cat nip. I want the work I do to help advance the field i’m passionate about and that will advance my career on its own. I’m driven about change and not just personal growth. I work on that in my spare time anyway.

Naturally, after speaking about what I want, I should be fair and tell you what’s in it for you. I’m not a 9-5 person. I’m a 24 x 7 person. That doesn’t mean I have zero work-life balance, but it means I’ll put in my 40 hours and more, but I will always think about the problem and how to solve it efficiently. If there is a nagging issue , I don’t clock out of my brain.

I’m well-rounded and flexible with most things and this skill of adaptability is what has helped me throughout life and i’ve had a great rapport with every circle of friends from college, to other companies and people i randomly meet at conferences or networking events.