VP of Data Science and Data Engineering at Thinx

Niels Joaquin

I am a data scientist and a senior technical leader, always looking for exciting ways to apply mathematical methods. My foundations are in statistics and economics, and I have played a role in all data areas of a company, from the modeling of data warehouses to the development of novel machine learning solutions. My experience spans academic research, e-commerce, retail, health and wellness, and mobile software.

https://nielsj.medium.com/what-i-worked-on-small-time-data-scientist-edition-a2f2b6598168

VP of Data Science and Data Engineering

Maven Clinic is a telemedicine company focusing on women's health.

- Developed the early stages of machine learning models for the prediction of C-sections and NICU admissions at the patient level

Sr. Director of Data Science

- Founded the data science team and scaled it to six people from scratch: three data scientists, two analysts, and one data engineer. Sourced and recruited very actively and often handled the recruiting pipeline end to end
- Wrote the original data pipeline: Airflow running Python and SQL jobs, all Dockerized and deployed to AWS
- On the ML side, supervised my data scientists across various projects in computer vision (object detection for quality control, image recognition for mobile apps), assembly-line simulation, subscription churn, customer clustering, and health tracking

https://medium.com/careof-tech/health-programs-our-vision-for-software-and-data-at-care-of-e66c6c187494

VP of Data Science

FiftyThree was a mobile software company that created Paper, a sketching app that won Apple's iPad App of the Year. FiftyThree was acquired by WeTransfer in 2018.

- First data hire for the company. Established the analytics stack from the ground up:

(1) ETL that processes millions of app events per day, using an open-source tool (Luigi) to coordinate Python and SQL jobs
(2) a Redshift data warehouse
(3) a visualization tool for business intelligence

- On the machine learning side, prototyped several exploratory projects in image recognition and NLP using scikit-learn, TensorFlow, and Keras

Head of Data Science

- Covered a wide range of data needs as the second data hire at Bonobos, from foundational ETL and reporting tools to statistics and analytics
- Improved relevance of email marketing with collaborative filtering and a random forest model

Manager of Data Science

Product Manager
2013
- Managed a critical project to overhaul inventory tracking as the most common deal structure changed to span multiple time periods

Business Intelligence Analyst
2012 – 2013
- Automated five sales performance dashboards for the largest department at Groupon, integrating data from various sources and saving many hours of manual analyst work per week

Operations and Data Manager, Editorial
2010 – 2012
- Scaled the editorial site administration team from 10 to 100 people through active recruiting and people management as the company rapidly expanded

Product Manager

- Research professional for Professor Luigi Zingales
- Data wrangling and regression analysis for various academic papers on behavioral economics and finance

Research Professional

- Research assistant for Professor Paola Sapienza
- Assisted large-scale experiments using z-Tree, standard software for economics experiments
- Simulated economic models with MATLAB

Research Assistant

Research Assistant
2005 – 2007
- Research assistant for Professor Attila Ambrus
- Used Mathematica and MATLAB to verify mathematical proofs. Created graphs and figures for game-theoretic models

Course Assistant
2005 – 2007
- Undergraduate teaching assistant for "Calculus, Series, and Differential Equations" and "Linear Algebra and Differential Equations"
- Planned and led weekly section, graded problem sets, tutored at Math Question Center. Received high course evaluations from students

Tutor and Math Instructor
2004 – 2005
- Designed and taught the first Advanced Placement course at Madison Park Technical Vocational High School, Calculus AB, to two students under the supervision of the Harvard Graduate School of Education