Open to opportunities

Rita Chen

@ritachen

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Principal data scientist driving production ML solutions and operational impact.

United States

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What I'm looking for

I seek hands‑on roles building production ML systems in collaborative, impact‑oriented teams with strong MLOps and cloud practices.

I am a Principal Data Scientist with deep hands‑on experience designing and deploying production machine learning systems across supply chain, healthcare, and manufacturing domains. I lead cross‑functional teams to deliver scalable models and data products that reduce costs and automate decision making.

My work includes building AGV task allocation and scheduling systems, 3D bin‑packing optimizations deployed across 16 plants, demand forecasting engines using ensemble time‑series models, and computer vision solutions for safety and monitoring. I combine cloud expertise (AWS, GCP), data engineering practices, and MLOps to move prototypes into production reliably.

I mentor and manage data scientists and engineers, drive stakeholder engagement, and focus on measurable business impact—examples include a $1M revenue impact from insurance verification automation and substantial transportation and labor cost reductions through operational ML solutions.

Experience

Work history, roles, and key accomplishments

Current

Lead Data Scientist

Current

Magna International

Jun 2023 - Present (2 years 3 months)

Led a cross-functional team to deliver production ML systems for warehouse automation, reducing AGV task latency by 35% and cutting transportation costs per plant by 20% across 16 plants. Deployed CV, forecasting, and bin-packing solutions to production and built a Model Zoo web platform to scale internal model adoption.

Python Pyspark TensorFlow PyTorch AWS Sagemaker Computer Vision Simulation

Senior Data Scientist

HumanCare Systems

Aug 2021 - Jun 2023 (1 year 10 months)

Led ML automation for medical insurance verification, deploying production solutions that contributed $1M revenue and reduced data lake latency from 96 hours to 2 minutes. Implemented CI/CD for ML infra and developed real-time pipelines and Next Best Action models to improve patient outreach.

AWS Sagemaker SQL DBT CI CD CatBoost Talend Data Engineering Monitoring

Data Scientist

CoreLogic

Jun 2020 - Aug 2021 (1 year 2 months)

Developed ensemble regression models to predict mortgage interest rates with high accuracy and implemented efficient PySpark/dbt data pipelines that reduced feature extraction and model runtime by 65%. Built missing-value imputation and outlier-detection solutions to maintain model performance.

Pyspark DBT AutoML Data Pipelines

Investment Analyst

EdBeta Fund

Nov 2017 - Aug 2018 (9 months)

Performed market and competitive analysis of China’s EdTech sector, producing reports with ~100K views and 20K downloads and maintaining Snowflake-based pipelines and Tableau dashboards for LP reporting. Identified and recommended deal opportunities.

Market Research Snowflake Tableau Data Visualization Pipeline Management Competitive Analysis SQL

Education

Degrees, certifications, and relevant coursework

Tufts University

Master of Science, Data Science

2019 - 2021

Activities and societies: Teaching Assistant — Introduction to Machine Learning; NLP Capstone: "Error Analysis of Machine Comprehension on SQuAD2.0"

Completed an M.S. in Data Science within the Computer Science Department, including a NLP capstone on error analysis of machine comprehension and serving as a teaching assistant for Introduction to Machine Learning.