Team Lead and Data Scientist
Booking.com
Total years of experience :14 years, 7 Months
- Managed and facilitated an agile team of data scientists and developers.
- Held weekly one on ones to support the growth of the team members and provide regular feedback.
- Assessed individual and team performance on a quarterly basis.
- Worked closely with product and commercial teams to understand their data needs. Translated business questions into analytics questions and transformed complex datasets into impactful, actionable results for these teams.
- Created a recommendation engine that is used to help our hotel partners improve their performance on the website.
- Advised teams on how to run A/B tests.
- Interviewed data science candidates and helped to improve the hiring process.
- Detection of duplicate items and item connections (i.e. detecting that two items are the same, but only have a different size) using an image and text based solution.
- Designed the schema for Souq's catalog data on DynamoDB.
- Worked on the company's recommendation engine, mainly using collaborative filtering techniques. Recommendations included "People who viewed also viewed" and "People who searched for also searched for". Technologies used in these implementations include: Python, Mahout, Apache Spark, Hadoop, Hive, MySQL and Sqoop.
- Personalized the homepage by inferring user preferences using Apache Spark. User preferences included their favorite brands and favorite categories. This data was stored in a Cassandra database.
- Created ETLs to move data from MySQL into Hive, and also to move Omniture data to Hive.
- Created proof-of-concepts while exploring the most suitable recommendation approaches for our business. These included a user-user collaborative filtering recommender, and a content based recommender.
- Evaluated and compared a number of databases including Neo4j, Cassandra, DynamoDB, and MongoDB for use on different projects.
- Created a proof-of-concept for demand forecasting.
- Used Linux (Ubuntu), TCL, Subversion, Oracle, PostgreSQL, MySQL, jQuery and JavaScript while developing software.
- Worked with a team of 15 members on the company’s website www.bayt.com
- Maintained and implemented new features on career websites for many different clients.
- Gave 3 training sessions about the Yii framework, and MongoDB to share knowledge with the team.
- Developed software using a variety of technologies, including Linux (Fedora), PHP, Yii framework, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Git, jQuery and Redis
- Implemented an offer management system
- Worked with the offer management system’s end users on finalizing new feature requirements
- Worked with a team of 7 developers on maintaining the company’s commercial website
- Implemented a reporting tool to visualize data collected from the website’s users graphically.
- Developed rapid proof-of-concept prototypes, including a Firefox add-on written in javascript
- Coordinated and reviewed all tasks given to 2 remote developers
Worked on computerizing the company's IQ test using VB.NET, ASP.NET and Oracle. Designed the GUI, drew entity relationship diagrams, and began implementing the system.
Worked on the Arabic Handwriting Optical Character Recognition Engine research under the supervision of Dr Gheith Abandah. In my time working here, I worked closely with 2 other team members to adapt an open source optical character recognition engine to fit the requirements of the Arabic language. The programming language used was C++ in Microsoft Visual Studio
The clubhouse allows young adults aged 11 - 18 in underserved neighborhoods to learn more about computers in a safe environment. While there I held an internet security workshop for children aged 14 - 18, and a handicrafts workshop for children aged 11 - 18. In addition, I supervised robotics projects, Scratch programming projects, and Windows Movie Maker projects.
Simultaneously typed and translated (Arabic - English) discussions held during a conference
Edexcel Award for Outstanding Academic Achievement (2006 Examinations). Edexcel Award for Outstanding Academic Achievement (2005 Examinations).