Open to opportunities

Justin Vastola

@justinvastola

Message

Senior Data Scientist and AI/ML Engineer driving production AI solutions.

United States

Message

What I'm looking for

I seek senior roles building production AI/ML systems in collaborative, product-focused teams where I can lead model-to-deployment efforts, mentor engineers, and drive measurable business impact.

I am a Senior Data Scientist and AI/ML Engineer with over 12 years of experience designing, developing, and delivering analytics and AI solutions across technology, media, telecommunications, and healthcare.

I have led cross-functional teams and directed data science organizations to build production ML systems — from recommendation engines and inventory management to predictive maintenance and personalization platforms — improving engagement, operational efficiency, and revenue.

My technical expertise includes deep learning (TensorFlow, PyTorch), NLP (transformer models), MLOps (Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD, SageMaker, Vertex AI), big data technologies (Spark, Kafka, Airflow), and a broad analytics/statistics background from my Ph.D. in industrial engineering and statistics.

I am committed to translating complex data into scalable, business-aligned solutions, mentoring teams, and accelerating product innovation through rigorous model validation, A/B testing, and cloud-native deployment.

Experience

Work history, roles, and key accomplishments

Current

Principal AI/ML Engineer

Current

Nike

Jan 2021 - Present (4 years 10 months)

Designed and deployed end-to-end AI systems including recommendation engines and ML-driven inventory management that increased user engagement and improved operational efficiency; led GAN-based product design prototyping and mentored junior engineers to scale AI capabilities.

TensorFlow PyTorch Recommendation Systems AWS GCP MLOps NLP Docker

Senior Lead Data Scientist

Peacock

Nov 2019 - Jan 2021 (1 year 2 months)

Developed and deployed AI-powered content recommendation and reinforcement learning systems that improved user retention and ad targeting, and led NLP features for automated tagging and content summarization to speed content categorization.

Reinforcement Learning Deep Learning Collaborative Filtering NLP A B Testing Spark Python SQL

Director, Data Science

Cox Communications

Jan 2019 - Nov 2019 (10 months)

Directed data science teams to build predictive churn and preventive maintenance models and introduced deep-learning demand prediction integrating external data, improving retention and reducing downtime.

Churn Modeling Deep Learning Python AWS SQL

Director, Data Science

Turner Broadcasting System, Inc

Oct 2018 - Jan 2019 (3 months)

Led teams to optimize content distribution using predictive viewership models and audience segmentation, deployed ML into live environments and applied NLP for sentiment analysis to inform content strategy.

Predictive Analysis NLP Segmentation A B Testing Python SQL Data Visualization

Manager, Data Science

Turner Broadcasting System, Inc

Feb 2018 - Oct 2018 (8 months)

Managed data scientists to build real-time pipelines and personalized recommendation models, implemented scalable model deployment on cloud infrastructure and created executive analytics dashboards.

Recommendation Systems Deployment ETL Dashboards Python Kafka Airflow

Principal Data Scientist

Turner Broadcasting System, Inc

Nov 2016 - Feb 2018 (1 year 3 months)

Developed and deployed content recommendation and dynamic pricing models, applied deep learning to content discovery and used NLP to extract insights from user feedback to drive content decisions.

Recommendation Systems Dynamic Pricing Deep Learning NLP Time Series Python SQL

Statistician

IBM

Jan 2013 - Jul 2014 (1 year 6 months)

Built and validated econometric and statistical models for retail clients to improve sales forecasting and demand optimization, contributing to enhancements in IBM's retail demand modeling.

Clustering R Python Forecasting SQL Data Visualization