ANKIT PATHAK
San Jose,USA
Summary
Accomplished Data Science leader with 10+ years of expertise in leveraging advanced ML, Causal Inference, and A/B testing to drive significant outcomes across Monetization, Product, Marketing and Infrastructure. Proven success in leading cross-functional teams to implement data-informed strategy in high-growth startups and large-scale organizations.
Overview
13
13
years of professional experience
Work History
Staff Data Scientist
Meta
Menlo Park, CA
07.2022 - Current
- Spearheaded data science foundations for AI4P (AI for Productivity) and AI4Q (AI for Quality) workstreams, curating goaling metrics and identifying critical productivity bottlenecks around code review, CI/CD pipelines, and testing, which led to a 30% increase in topline productivity and 3x AI adoption.
- Established a foundational metrics lever map for developer productivity for the Instagram Engineering team; this framework was subsequently adopted across Instagram (~2.8K engineers) and eventually all of Meta.
- Finance
- Partnered with Applied Research to develop ML models for duplicate invoice detection, resulting in $180M in potential annual risk savings, and improved "on-time payments" by 7% through a new Northstar efficiency metric.
- Ads (Monetization)
- Pioneered a US-wide geo-experiment with Google that justified a $120M budget increase by establishing paid media incrementality of up to 30% for Small Business Group’s Off-Platform Ads.
- Developed a Markov Chain-based Lifetime Value model, unlocking over $65M in optimization opportunities for advertiser acquisition.
Senior Manager – Data Science & Analytics
Walmart Labs
San Jose, CA
12.2017 - 06.2022
- Managed teams of up to 13 data scientists and data engineers for product data science and marketing (display, social, email, push) data science teams.
- Led analytics for Walmart’s website/app redesign across 25+ features, building 12+ executive dashboards and integrating 16+ clickstream tables on GCP/Hadoop.
- Developed a customer churn prediction model using decision trees and k-means, earning the "Tredence Star" award twice (2020, 2021).
- Established pre-launch foundations for analytics engineering, data warehousing, and real-time ML workflows as a founding member of the 'Walmart Business' data team.
- (mostly consulting through Tredence Inc. but a couple of months towards the end as a Walmart FTE too)
Co-founder and CTO
Adferns Media
Bangalore, India
07.2018 - 01.2020
- Founded and scaled a bootstrapped programmatic marketing business to $600k revenue.
- Developed the Adferns Ad-exchange (2.4 RTB spec), capable of handling 3,000 queries per second and 200M daily requests.
Simulation Engineer
Andritz Automation
Bangalore, India
06.2013 - 09.2016
- Built "digital twins" of processing plants using mathematical and empirical modeling to develop automation solutions.
Education
Masters and Bachelor of Technology -
Indian Institute of Technology (ISM)
Dhanbad, India01.2013
Skills
- Tools: Python (Pandas, Scikit-Learn, PyTorch), SQL, R, Spark, Airflow
- AI Tooling: ClaudeCode, Advanced prompting techniques
- Cloud & DBs: GCP (BigQuery), AWS, Snowflake, Databricks, Hive, Hadoop
- Techniques: Machine Learning, Digital Experimentation (A/B testing), Causal Inference
- Visualization: Tableau, Looker, Power BI, Streamlit (Snowflake)
Affiliations
- Sigma Xi - Full Member
- IEEE Senior Member
Timeline
Staff Data Scientist
Meta
07.2022 - Current
Co-founder and CTO
Adferns Media
07.2018 - 01.2020
Senior Manager – Data Science & Analytics
Walmart Labs
12.2017 - 06.2022
Simulation Engineer
Andritz Automation
06.2013 - 09.2016
Masters and Bachelor of Technology -
Indian Institute of Technology (ISM)