Scott Edwards

Over a decade of hands-on experience in all aspects of Data Engineering (integration, pipelines/ETL, modeling, design, and performance tuning) and extensive cloud experience (particularly in AWS and GCP) 

 PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE: 

FIGURE Remote 2021 – 2023 

Senior Director of Data Analytics (80% hands-on) 

Led the analytics and analytics engineering functions for a blockchain based lending platform – managed a staff analytics engineer, two senior analysts, and three analysts. Partnered closely with data engineering department. 

Responsible for design, development, and maintenance of a large (> 300 tables and dashboards) enterprise data warehouse in BigQuery and Tableau, driven by Airflow process orchestration 

Partnered closely with heads of all major departments (finance, credit, capital markets, marketing, product) to fully understand their business needs and devise ideas to use data and analytics to optimize their businesses 

Implemented rigorous A/B testing methodology based on sound statistical theory 

Designed custom schemas in BigQuery for “power users” embedded in business units that knew SQL 

Developed over 100 SQL scripts to drive custom dashboards in Tableau (many hundreds of lines long) 

Devised custom linear television spot attribution algorithm and implemented at scale in Google BigQuery 

Produced marketing attribution algorithm accommodating all offline and online sources 

TEMPEST Remote 2021 (function eliminated) 

Director of Data & Analytics (100% hands-on) 

Managed both data analytics and data engineering departments. In six months transitioned a small startup from having no data department (all analysis and report/dashboard development was effectively being done by product managers using Google sheets) to having an enterprise-grade data and analytics pipeline fully deployed in the cloud 

Created and executed data strategy roadmap to move from spreadsheet-driven analytics to fully engineered cloud data platform powering AI/ML personalization of online alcohol recovery product 

Partnered with finance to comb through a massive list of proposed KPIs to quickly identify the key metrics for the company and ensure they were defined in such a way to easily operationalize and calculate 

Wrote and optimized large number of SQL queries for critical KPI reports and dashboards (Google Data Studio) 

Saved the company over $250k in annual license fees by cancelling plans to purchase Google Analytics Premium subscription and replaced it with a better solution that costs about $1000 / month (GA4+BigQuery) 

Implemented fully agile workflow for department using Jira Kanban boards for analytics and data engineering, supported by ten reports and dashboards to monitor flow, backlog, and improvement over time 

Assisted in market survey and design, including sophisticated MaxDiff survey designs 

Conducted statistical analysis of alcohol-use-disorder outcomes research, using both parametric and non-parametric statistics. Wrote up results for business explaining approach, caveats, and results in assessable language without sacrificing critical nuances they needed to know 

MENTAL MOBILE, LLC Glendale, CA 2018-2020 

Co-Founder (100% hands-on) 

Deep-dive analytics, including complex SQL queries, for a novel dating app using Google BigQuery pulling data from the app back-end Firebase Analytics (now Google Analytics 4) devised custom reports that allowed us to solve a key pain-points in the app regarding user engagement patterns 

1. “Thinking in SQL”: beginner to intermediate level course focused on the international SQL standard (published on Udemy) 

CORE DIGITAL MEDIA Playa Vista, CA 2019 – 2020 (pandemic layoff) 

VP, Data Science and Analytics (50% hands-on) 

Lead the data science and analytics teams at a prominent performance marketing company, owned by Quicken Loans: 

Lead and develop the Director of Data Science and Senior Director of Analytics (as well as the Manager of Lending Analytics and the Manager of Insurance Analytics, reporting to those directors) 

Transition all SQL queries and reports from a legacy Oracle + Microstrategy environment into a Snowflake + Tableau infrastructure (including optimizing SQL to take advantage of Snowflake optimizations) 

Evolve the team workflows from siloed and fragmented to a Lean Kanban agile style of working, resulting in improvements to cycle time and better collaboration, cross-training, and stakeholder satisfaction 

Drive acquisition optimization by introducing a new paradigm of A/B testing of marketing campaigns, moving from untested and unfounded "rules of thumb" to a sophisticated testing framework based on cutting-edge Bayesian statistics and machine learning (utilizing a multi-armed bandit approach) 

Evolve the analytics function from a low-level report-pulling function to a highly technically skilled (e.g., advanced SQL, Tableau) enabler of business users 

Drive improvements to machine learning models that score thousands of leads a day in Lending and Education and utilize deep learning frameworks in an ensemble model architecture 

Develop custom statistical testing simulations in Python to make better decisions on marketing methodology 

NBCUniversal / Gorilla Logic Universal City, CA 2016 – 2018 

Director, Data Science and Analytics (80% hands-on) 

Lead the Data Science & Analytics team in NBC Digital Entertainment: 

Evaluate effectiveness of direct-to-consumer marketing campaigns via experimental design and analysis 

Analyze granular digital analytics data (device/platform level) uncovering patterns of consumer behavior on NBC app 

Assist in design and statistical evaluation of product team’s A/B experiments on multiple digital platforms 

Regularly present projects and findings to executive teams and interpret results in clear business terms 

Develop 1:1 customer segmentation model for product marketing based on predictive factors driving NBC episode views 

Use ML techniques (e.g., Random Forests) to score customers on propensity to return to app and consume video (reduce churn) 

Design and coding of a collaborative-filtering recommendation engine for NBC app on Spark AWS platform in Python Executed 100% of full process: from identifying opportunity, pitching stakeholders, coding engine 

Results: Recommendation users visited on average 14 times/qtr. to NBC app (vs. 5 for control) Average number of episode plays was 11 for recommendation users (vs. 7 for control) 

Design and create custom data visualizations and data sets in cloud BI platform (Domo) based on gathered bus. requirements 

Construct complex ad-hoc SQL to process large data sets from an AWS Redshift Data Warehouse 

Gather requirements from business units and collaborate with Data Engineering to design/develop cloud-based hybrid ‘data platform’ (data lake + data warehouse + BI) 

HAWTHORNE Los Angeles, CA 2016 

Senior Director, Data Science and Business Intelligence (70% hands-on) 

Full ownership of data science and analytics strategy and implementation for an established full-service television and digital brand-response advertising agency, including: 

1. Collaborate with our Principal Scientist and Director of Engineering on improvements to in-house DRTV-to-Web-response attribution platform 
2. Evaluate and test multi-touch attribution vendor solutions, such as Marketshare and Conversion Logic 
3. Building advanced multiple regression models tying media spend to client KPI’s (media-mix modeling) 
4. Develop custom decks for new client pitches detailing our data science capabilities and offerings 
5. Design from the ground-up our first enterprise data warehouse to replace legacy operational reporting systems (including extensive dimensional-modeling and requirements gathering with stakeholders)

Grow and develop a two-person data science team into a six-person high performing team in six months 

Collaborate with account management to transform business questions into data science requirements 

SYMANTEC Los Angeles, CA 2013-2015 

Technical Director, Data Science (80% hands-on) 

Provided strong technical direction to a new Data Science team, including: 

Introduce and implement a Big Data analytics platform as well as lead the design of a Dimensional Data Warehouse, integrating data from diverse enterprise source systems with structured and non-structured data 

Develop “Next Best Action” analytics product that employs custom algorithms to optimize sales offers within the support channel, combining machine learning and statistics. 

Devise an original recommendation algorithm for our support website to drive customer retention 

Director, Support Analytics (50% hands-on) 

Lead team of 15 analysts, distributed around the world, providing BI, analytics, and a data warehouse: 

Restructure the team from a flat organization, with significant duplication of effort and lack of coordination, into five focused groups, aligned with the business units, and each led by a single-point-of-contact 

Integrate three new functions into the group: Data Governance, Data Warehouse Architecture, and Predictive Analytics (including attracting high-profile Ph.D. hires from top-tier universities like Caltech) 

Lead the development of a new analytics product, employing a custom algorithm to better direct customers through a retention flow, resulting in projected savings of approximately $500k/year 

TALUS LABS Los Angeles, CA 2012 – 2013 

Optimization Engineer and Data Warehouse Architect (100% hands-on) 

Lead development of custom bid and budget optimization algorithms for a Search Engine Marketing platform serving thousands of SMB accounts, as well as devise and implement data warehousing strategy and execution: 

Develop original Search Engine Marketing (SEM) bid/budget optimization engine, using statistical modeling combined with portfolio optimization 

Chief architect of a major enterprise-wide data warehouse development initiative, including collecting all requirements from the business, as well as the design, architecture, and tooling 

AT&T INTERACTIVE Glendale, CA 2007-2012 

Associate Director – Performance and Bid Management (100% hands-on) 

Responsible for Search Engine Marketing bid optimization system, setting bids on thousands of SMB accounts: 

Develop original Search Engine Marketing (SEM) bidding & budgeting algorithm that optimizes individual account lead goals, while satisfying portfolio-level budget constraints 

Perform statistical analysis of performance data, as it related to churn (e.g., logistic regression) 

Develop a Data Warehouse in SQL Server from the ground-up (which allowed the group to move from Excel-based reporting on thousands of rows of data to fully automated SQL reports on hundreds of millions of rows) 

Utilize Adobe Analytics (Omniture) to measure traffic and user behaviors on website 

Participate in a large enterprise data warehouse design and development initiative, in a variety of roles (business process modeling, dimensional design, implementation of data ‘universes’ in Business Objects) 

EDUCATION and INTERNSHIPS: 

M.S., Clinical Psychology (all PhD coursework completed), Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL 

Statistics and Research Methodology classes and work experience (including a successful Thesis) 

B.S., Psychology, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO 

Culminated in professional publication of research in major peer-reviewed journal 

 PROFESSIONAL CLOUD CERTIFICATIONS: 

• AWS Cloud Practitioner 
• AWS Data Engineer Associate (sat for exam but cert. is pending – new AWS cert. still in beta) 

RECENT PROFESSIONAL TRAININGS: 

• AWS Certified Data Engineer Associate 2024 - Hands On! (Udemy)