## Loadsmart, Cary, NC
VP of Engineering | 02/2022 - Present
- Reporting directly to the CTO
- After the post COVID-19 crisis, helped the reduction of R&D spent from 50M to 15M.
- Built and mentored a high-performing engineering team of 40 technologists across 5 disciplines.
- In charge of the machine learning and AI squads implementing: conversational agents (using LLM models), automated insights engine, pricing algorithms, computer vision algorithms and recommendation engines. Also leveraging Engineering performance through AI tooling adoption.
- In charge of the data platform squads (data engineers and analytics engineer), organizing data ingestion pipelines, data publication, OLAP -> OLTP sync, and analytics tooling and dashboards (PBI, Superset, Looker).
- Replaced AWS Redshift for open-source tools (Trino/AWS S3/Iceberg/Minio) to build a more cost effective lakehouse. Introduced data assets index with a data catalog, started a data governance program and organized the decentralized business intelligence staff into a collaborative community.
- Idealized a low-cost platform for data integration leveraging pre-existing building blocks: jupyter notebooks, jupyter hub, airflow and papermill.
- Supported leadership in two rounds of downsizing after the COVID-19 freight crisis while keeping retention and morale high.
- Automated custom reports and analysis of AWS costs to support Engineering in fine-tuning cloud expenses.
- Supported HR in engineering compensation analysis to plan merit and rewards program.
- Spearheaded adoption of Jupyter notebooks for data analysts, giving personal training and coaching, increasing productivity by 35%.
- Managed annual technology budget of 3M, consistently delivering projects on time and within budget.
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## Work & Co, NYC, NY
Group Technology Director | 09/2016 - 02/2022
- Led multiple backend technology teams, with these clients: Philz Coffee, CBS/Givewith, Ikea, RedRobin and Gatorade.
- Idealized the PhilzCoffee barista reservation scheme for mobile orders, the Givewith mathematical model to matchmake Non-profits programs to sponsoring Brands and the Gatorade Gx nutrition and hydration recommendation engine.
- Engaged in mentoring tech leads and other directors.
- Actively participated in interviewing and evaluating new talents, as well as optimizing internal processes towards company growth.
- Participated as an individual hands-on contributor on internal and external projects.
- Engineered Restful and GraphQL APIs, modelled and implemented recommendation engines, participating in the full digital product lifecycle from conception to production, including maintenance and evolution.
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## EMC (now DELL), Rio de Janeiro, RJ
Senior Principal Data Scientist | 04/2014 - 09/2016
- Led a research team of pioneer data scientists to discover and create new technologies and data products.
- Elected member of the patent committee board of reviewers at EMC.
- Received Silver Medal and Innovators internal Award.
- Coaching and training to customers (Bank Itaú, Embraer Aerospace Agency) about ML adoption using Python, SciPy and SciKit-learn.
- Executed projects for TelCel (diagnostic of cell network failures based on Tweet analysis) and Televisa (replicating the Netflix - House of Cards data-driven design success story for soup operas) in México
- Executed projects for Petrobras (Brazilian biggest State Oil&Gas company) to optimize Logistics through discrete event simulation and System Dynamics techniques
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For prior to 2014 experience all the way back to 1996, please see [linkedin.com/in/rodsenra](http://linkedin.com/in/rodsenra)