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Michael B

@michaelb5

Senior Data Scientist at Snap building ranking, retrieval, and RAG systems for Snapchat’s Feed, Creator, and Spotlight experiences.

United States

Message

At Snap Inc., I work on Snapchat’s Feed, Creator, and Spotlight experiences, improving content discovery with ranking and retrieval systems, creator-focused RAG experiences, and transformer-based NLP. I also lead experimentation for growth and ads ranking, including work on the experimentation platform and KPI anomaly detection.

At Netflix, I worked on personalization and content discovery, developing recommendation and learning-to-rank models and experiments that improved discovery and engagement. At Lyft, I built ML systems for shared rides and airport marketplaces, including Priority Pickup and pricing and pickup-time models; two ideas were patented, including one as a co-inventor.

Experience

Work history, roles, and key accomplishments

Current

Senior Data Scientist

Current

Snap Inc.

Feb 2024 - Present (2 years 8 months)

Spearheaded content ranking and retrieval systems for Snapchat's Feed and Creator surfaces, redesigning indexing, freshness scoring, and cold-start strategies. Built and deployed ML models for engagement prediction and RAG pipelines with LLMs, and led experimentation for Growth and Ads Ranking.

Machine Learning Recommendation Systems Content Ranking RAG LLM Transformer based NLP Experimentation A B Testing Causal Inference Python SQL PySpark AWS Metaflow Airflow Spark Microservices Geospatial Information Systems

Senior Data Scientist

Netflix

Nov 2022 - Feb 2024 (1 year 3 months)

Led data science initiatives for personalization and content discovery, applying Python, SQL, PySpark, and machine learning across large-scale member data. Developed recommendation and learning-to-rank models, designed A/B experiments, and built reproducible data workflows with Metaflow and AWS.

Python SQL PySpark Machine Learning Statistical Modeling Behavioral Analytics Recommendation Systems Learning To Rank A B Testing Causal Inference Metaflow AWS Feature Engineering Offline Evaluation

Senior ML Engineer

Lyft

Dec 2019 - Nov 2022 (2 years 11 months)

Tech lead of the Airports Program, owning ML-driven dispatch optimization, rider conversion, and driver queueing. Designed airport priority-matching systems, built ML models for the Rider Portfolio Platform, and co-invented a personalized cancellation-fee decisioning system.

Machine Learning Dispatch Optimization Demand Forecasting Quantile Regression Experimentation Switchback Testing Python Go Microservices Geospatial Information Systems Stakeholder Management

ML Engineer

Lyft

Jul 2018 - Dec 2019 (1 year 5 months)

Designed the model-building framework for Shared Rides matching, improving match rate and reducing detour time. Improved walking-pickup-point optimization and pickup/drop-off-time models, and shipped in-app ML-driven experiences across the Shared ride journey.

Machine Learning Model Building Python Go Microservices Experimentation Shared Mobility