Katia Hayati ⋅ hayati.katia@gmail.com ⋅ 408-507-9110

Summary

I am an independent data science consultant and software engineer with extensive  experience being part of and leading teams working on search, machine learning,  analytics, and infrastructure projects.

Employment history

Independent consultant (2013-current)  

Data science and machine learning consultant. Working independently or with an established team, and writing production code or mining offline data, I help companies crack their tough data-related problems.

Selected clients and projects include:

• Portrait Analytics: helped build the MVP of a fintech product that uses ChatGPT to help investors with market research. Worked on information extraction of SEC filings and document indexing.
• Karat: interviewed about 350 software engineer candidates as one of the first Interview Engineers. Developed, tested, and launched over a dozen 45-minute coding question sets and 10 to 20-minute knowledge question sets on topics such as machine learning, mathematics and statistics, system design, and software and test best practices. Collectively these questions have been used in tens of thousands of live candidate interviews. Developed processes for authoring, reviewing, and testing new content and mentored a team of six content developers.
• Sojern: Defined and prototyped a provably fair advertising revenue attribution model. Worked with CTO to design an A/B testing framework.
• Agari: helped validate feasibility of new line of business by building and  evaluating a machine learning model. Bootstrapped a supervised classifier  with unsupervised learning to overcome absence of labeled data and data  labeling resources.
• Radius Intelligence: defined and implemented a quality evaluation process  for entity matching. Designed, implemented and launched an algorithm  improvement to halve recall errors while keeping precision constant. Worked  with VP of Engineering and CTO to define and interview for a data science  engineer position.

Senior engineering manager – Groupon (August 2011-September 2012) Worked with sales, city planning, engineering and data science to build a demand  forecasting system. Built an email A/B testing framework and reduced outages due to  setup errors from several a day to 0. Significantly increased revenue and user  engagement by continuously delivering relevance & UI improvements.

VP of Engineering – VideoGenie (June 2010-August 2011)

Employee #1 at social video marketing startup, reporting to the CEO. Hired and  managed a team of backend and frontend engineers. Defined and project managed product roadmap, and met every crazy deadline. Helped grow client list  from 2 to 60+ and pageviews from a handful to several million a day. Worked with  Chief Architect to design and implement infrastructure, including fully customizable  video recording, internationalization, analytics processing, video search, and smart  playlist ranking.

Founder – Broken Chord Media, LLC (July 2009-May 2011) Launched & sold Harmonious.ly, a Web site to help music teachers and students find and connect to each other. Led every aspect of business definition, product design, architecture, and user testing. Some notable projects: teacher search with search expansion, spelling correction.

Lead software development engineer – Tellme / Microsoft (May 2006-May  2009)

Managed the Search team, which generated about 40% of company revenue. Led  architecture, managed and mentored engineers. Worked with Live Search and MSR  teams to incorporate Tellme technology into Microsoft Search and voice products.  Worked with speech and linguistics teams to dramatically increase automation of  voice calls and relevance of text search queries. Led design, development and  refinement of business category search. Awarded patent for new spelling correction  algorithm. Developed algorithmic performance improvements that quadrupled  backend capacity while keeping relevance constant.

Technical lead – Yahoo! (January 2005-May 2006)

Worked on contextual advertising, applying computational linguistics and machine  learning techniques to the problem of finding relevant text ads to display on a  webpage. Also developed an innovative classification algorithm to detect pages on  which it would be inappropriate to display ads.

Education

● MSc in Computer Science: University of California, Santa Cruz, June 2004

● MSc in Mathematics: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, May 2002

● BSc in Mathematics, summa cum laude: American University in Cairo,  February 2000

Publications and patents

● Katia Hayati. “Spelling correction based on input device geometry”. US Patent  7,865,824, 2011.

● S. Chang, S. Boyce, K. Hayati, I. Alphonso, B. Buntschuh. "Modalities and  Demographics in Voice Search: Learnings from Three Case Studies". IEEE  International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, 2008.

● Katia Hayati. “Language Identification on the World Wide Web”. UCSC  Master’s Project, 2004.

● Katia Hayati and Martín Abadi. “Language-Based Enforcement of Privacy  Policies”. Privacy Enhancing Technologies, 4th International Workshop, PET  2004, Revised Selected Papers, Springer-Verlag (2005), 302-313.