Cyber-5: Data Scientists on the front-lines, and we’re loving it

Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the days in between (aka Cyber-5) are the most important days of the year for Skai’s clients, in terms of marketing budgets, online advertising volume and business goals. As Data Scientists at Skai, we’re accountable for our ML solutions which help our clients hit those goals, and so we must be ready to face any issue and take action if needed. Such issues can be related to elevated data scale, significant data drifts, data delays and many more challenges that can arise during these extremely high volume days.

For Data Scientists at Skai, these are 5 days where we’re constantly analyzing algorithmic outputs vs. business results, and intervene at real time where needed. This is extreme, we stay up all night, we eat, drink and we love it. And here is why:

First, who are we?

Skai (formerly Kenshoo) is a global intelligence market platform for effective marketing execution, campaign activation, monetization, and measurement across digital channels. Skai’s platform solution includes a suite of data-driven products for market intelligence insights, omnichannel media activation, testing, and measurement that enable product developers, brand managers, and marketers to make predictions, plan strategies and drive growth. As brands face a future without cookies or tracking IDs, Skai’s data-intensive approach enables them to intelligently navigate changing privacy regulations while rapidly bringing products to market.

What is Data Science at Skai?

In Skai, our DS teams have been implementing advanced Machine Learning solutions in the product’s core for more than 10 years. Our Data Scientists (20 overall) come from diverse analytical backgrounds, from mathematics and physics through statistical biology & brain research to operations research & engineering, and implement first-hand production deliverables that serve users, online advertisers and marketers on a daily basis, optimizing performance and producing actionable insights. Our DS DNA is all about making a real business impact in production, by gathering around a mission, expressing ourselves through research and innovation, owning the solution and getting it done.

We see fit_predict() as the means, not the goal.

To be able to produce this impact in the fast paced and ever changing environment of online marketing, where time-to-market is a key for success, and through years of experience, we facilitated DS within the organization as follows:

• Data Scientists are involved within the full cycle of the project — from ideation and conception, through implementation, to delivery. We navigate together with Product management, connecting with market specialists and clients to understand challenges and needs. We foster a ‘rounded’ Data Science approach, where the Data Scientist evolves into providing a POV and contributing to both product and engineering aspects.
• DS and Engineering teams belong to the same business groups, under one R&D organization, working according to coordinated Agile processes, working with aligned timelines and towards the same business objectives.
• An architects team, consisting of both Engineering and DS architects, is responsible for leveraging tools and methodologies, and standardizing them across DS and Engineering teams.

What are the responsibilities of a Data Scientist in Skai?

These can be segmented as following:

• Product development — taking a product requirement that cannot be defined by a simple flow chart (if -> then), researching and experimenting until finding a solution, focusing on the core of it (algos / models) while Engineering teams support the data pipelines, training and inference at scale.
• Creating and maintaining high quality production components — we develop our solutions and therefore own their quality over time, including testing, quality monitoring, relevant alerting and taking action as needed to maximize clients’ business results from those solutions.
• Innovation — proposing new applications that Skai provides to the market and are implemented later on in the product development.
• Data Science leadership — we serve as a center of excellence, creating and maintaining DS proficiency, providing career paths, advising and improving the field of ML in Skai. We aspire to use the best, most up-to-date SOTA technologies, which fit the sophisticated challenges we deal with.

Due to the nature of online advertising, some of our solutions’ feedback-loops are very short. An algo/model change can have a significant impact on business results within minutes, as millions of $ are being managed/invested by our solutions every day. One such solution is a large-scale system for solving the multi-dimensional, constrained and nonlinear convex problem of online marketing revenue optimization, consisting of both advanced ML methods and theoretical models. Holding algorithmic accountability over such systems within a dynamic environment, regularly puts Skai’s Data Scientists in a position where they are required to be both creative and innovative in order to solve new complex problems, and thoughtful about their potential impact, which is real and measurable. As a consequence, every analysis or model development has to be reviewed, tested and experimented properly at scale. Future evaluation and monitoring of any solution needs to be considered upfront, and a Data Scientist must consider constraints like runtime, memory, etc. while researching and developing. Those are just a few examples to describe what the day to day considerations might be like.

As Data Scientists at Skai, we have real challenges and responsibilities in our hands. We feel inspired when we research to solve tough analytical challenges, and successfully produce a creative ML solution. During Cyber 5 days, we celebrate as we see our solutions at their top impact and being stressed to the limit. Although it may sound weird, we like being in the front-lines where the action is , not just during Cyber 5, but everyday.

If you are a Data Scientist who can relate to this, and if seeing your creativity making an impact is truly what drives you every morning, we’ll be happy to hear from you.