Some great news! This year I am continuing my work at Cox Automotive as a Lead Data Scientist! This is a big step for me and I am very excited for what’s to come. My new role will narrow my focus to two areas.

Dealer.com Advertising

I will be transitioning away from a role where I support product teams across the entire Cox Automotive portfolio of media businesses, and into a role that mainly supports Dealer.com advertising. I will still have some responsibilities in other areas of the business, but my main focus is back with Dealer.com. There are many opportunities for Data Science in advertising, and my overall goals are to help them be more effective and less invasive, while being as ethical as the business will allow.

I’m still relatively new to this part of the business, so I don’t have much to say about it yet. But I hope to write about how it goes!

Data Science DevOps

I joined Cox Automotive in 2016 and was fully expecting to be overwhelmed by the sheer gravity of a high technology business. But everyone was so welcoming and helpful that it made my transition into a fast paced and high performance environment relatively painless.

When I joined, I noticed that for a group of such high performers, the Data Science team was missing out on some low-hanging fruit when it came to the reproducibility, deliverable quality/consistency, and collaboratibility of their work. I made it a personal mission to address these issues, because the team could be so much more effective if they spent more time on Data Science and less time trying to get old code to work, reinventing wheels, and translating outputs into different formats.

The practice of establishing the processes and tools that enable all of that is typically referred to as DevOps (for Development and Operations). My efforts on this front have been successful so far, and were officially recognized with this promotion. I plan to write a post about what I’ve done for the team these past two years, and am working on some exciting new things as Lead Data Scientist that will push our Data Science capabilities even further!