Meet the Team at Gousto Tech — Sheng Chai — Data Scientist

This post is part of our series interviewing members of our GoustoTech team. In this post, we meet Sheng Chai who is a Data Scientist in our Turnips squad.

Kicking things off with the toughest question, what’s your favourite food?

Oh too many to list.. A nice warm bowl of Beef Gyūdon.. Or Tamarind Chicken!

Please introduce yourself and tell us about your role at Gousto.

Hiya! I’m Sheng and I’m a Data Scientist embedded in the Turnips squad of the Discover tribe at Gousto. Our goal as Discover Tribe is to help our users to find recipes that they love on our exciting menu. In Turnips, we work on personalisation, that is to tailor the recipes we show to our users based on their preferences and dietary requirements.

How long have you been at Gousto?

Just over a year!

Can you tell us a little about your journey before arriving at Gousto?

Before Gousto, I was a data scientist at Monzo working on experimentation, causal inference, forecasting and lots of other data science stuff in Marketing!

What made you decide to join Gousto?

My love for food! 😋

And the fact that at Gousto we’re using data science to solve so many food-related problems. At Gousto, we use machine learning algorithms for menu planning, optimising our supply chain, showing users recipes that they love, and for managing churn and retention etc. There’s so many applications for Data Science at Gousto — it truly is a data company that loves food!

What has been the most exciting thing you’ve worked on at Gousto since joining?

On Rouxcommender (named after Michel Roux 👨‍🍳) — our recommender system! Before I joined Gousto had a really old recommender based on matrix factorization that takes ages to run and compute predictions. We’ve since completely rebuilt it from scratch using a Deep Learning model which not only is more accurate, but also allows us to update predictions live when menu changes at the last minute.

You can read more about our recommendation system here.

What’s in the pipeline that you’re excited about at Gousto?

At gousto we’re constantly working on expanding our menu to bring more choices and variety to our customers. With that also comes many more challenges — from menu planning, to supply chain, to helping users find recipes they love easier and quicker. And that also brings a lot of opportunities to work on challenging data science projects at Gousto!

How would you describe the culture at Gousto?

Gousto has a really strong learning and development culture. We have ‘tech 10%’ days every fortnight where everyone in tech can use it to do courses, learn new skills, work on personal development plans, or collaborate with other people to work on interesting projects. We also have a learning and development budget to spend which is great.

Why would you suggest that someone considers joining us at Gousto Tech?

If you love food and are interested in using tech to help Gousto become the nation’s most favourite way to eat, there are lots of challenges here at Gousto to solve — in particular — in data engineering to build and scale our data platform.

Data powers everything at Gousto, from our algorithms to decision making at all levels here. Getting the enormous amount of data we’re generating from our web/ mobile apps, backend systems and our factories is a big challenge.

We’re looking for many talented Data Engineers this year, so if this is you — come join us!