Sophie Searcy

Data Science education company that provides corporate training and the only accedited Data Science bootcamp. The 12 week bootcamp is a project-based curriculum that covers the breadth of the field of Data Science.

Curriculum Design: leads the curriculum team of 15 Senior Data Scientists. Curriculum is the primary product for the bootcamp business (\$4M revenue per yr) and the basis for major corporate training contracts (multiple \$300k+ pilots with \$1M/yr option).
Learning management system (LMS): launched internal LMS which managed lesson planning, deployment of content to students, grading and access to solutions. The LMS standardized content across the company and enabled company-wide metrics for first time.
Management and coordination: Introduced industry best-practices including company-wide prioritization meetings, code reviews, and continuous integration. Oversaw increase in internal collaboration: YOY 7x commits and 20x issues/pull requests. Managed codebase, resolving disputes between ICs and overseeing product development.
Instruction: Taught and mentored 100s of students entering data science. Authored dozens of lessons including: SVMs, Data Science Ethics, Deep Learning, Generative Adversarial Networks.

Wearables start-up building fabrics that pair electrical stimulation to apps. Fundraising: \$20k convertible note (\$1.5M cap, 20% discount). Competitions: The Bridge (Coca Cola’s Accelerator) finalist (ranked 22/200). AlphaLab Gear National Hardware Cup semi-finalist. Vogt Awards finalist (\$25k non-dilutive funding). XlerateHealth finalist. Bucks for Bright Ideas winner.

Proof of concept: Designed and built hardware and software proof of concept. Validated underlying technology, collected data on 100+ customer experiences in target audience and demonstrated product-market fit.
Scalable design: Led engineering teams managing user data and designing a product for 10k/yr volume: the entirely in-house product stack included electronics hardware, firmware, and desktop app.
Human resources: Managed HR. Designed collaborative, version controlled, company Handbook.

Project manager: Managed a data science team developing FOSS tools for replicable cross-platform video data processing at “Big Data” scale.
Web experiments: Designed full-stack web apps for large (n~1,000) behavioral experiments and administered experiments through Amazon Mechanical Turk. Mentored data scientists in full-stack design.
Interdisciplinary research: Lead author of interdisciplinary work on the foundations of learning and computational tractability of learning algorithms. Presented work in journals and conferences.