Samuel Taylor

Staff ML Engineer @ Coinbase

Austin, Texas, United States

About

I help scientists and researchers make real business impact through good engineering. I believe that relationships matter more than org charts, learning happens best through intelligent action, and that teamwork is leadership. Some things I'm proud of include the students I have helped learn to code, my pun generator, and a talk I delivered at one of the largest data science conferences. My interests include trustworthy models, imbalanced data, and (of course) putting machine learning into production. I studied computer science at Baylor University and have worked for companies including TripAdvisor and Indeed. I currently work as a Senior Machine Learning Engineer in Austin, TX.

Experience

  • Coinbase (Full-time · 4 yrs 11 mos)
    • Staff Machine Learning Engineer
      Apr 2023 - Present · 3 yrs 3 mos

    • Senior Machine Learning Engineer
      Aug 2021 - Apr 2023 · 1 yr 9 mos

  • Senior Machine Learning Engineer at Acrisure
    Mar 2020 - Jul 2021 · 1 yr 5 mos

    Outbound lead scoring - Designed and implemented a machine learning system to rank leads for a sales team - Trained logistic regression (scikit-learn) and GBDT (CatBoost) models on Kubeflow. Wrote FastAPI application to deploy models in Google Kubernetes Engine with DataDog monitoring. Used Bigtable as feature store. - Set up and ran experiment showing 29% uplift in conversion rate Lookalike modeling - Used unsupervised learning techniques to recommend new prospective business customers to insurance agents - Created distributed training pipeline using Kubeflow and Spotify Annoy. Defined system interfaces and built initial embedding model (random projection). Productionized a contrastive learning approach built with TensorFlow. - Designed A/B test

  • Indeed.com (Austin, Texas)
    • Data Scientist
      Mar 2019 - Mar 2020 · 1 yr 1 mo

      - Used Spark, Hive, and Scala to gather, transform, and analyze data - Built, trained, and monitored machine learning models used in a large-scale production system - Wrote maintainable, scalable, production-level Java code used to serve large volumes of traffic - Wrote and reviewed design documents and system architecture documents in collaboration with Software Engineers

    • Business Intelligence Developer
      Aug 2017 - Mar 2019 · 1 yr 8 mos

      - Helped executive stakeholders answer business questions with data, including metric definition, analysis, and communication of results - Wrote high quality ETL code, including integration with external API’s - Provided technical leadership for a team of six developers to create a data warehouse - Designed and developed a web scraping system with Python, Postgres, and Tableau that is used by C-level executives - Created a customer segmentation model using PCA and kNN

  • Data Engineer at Square Root, Inc.
    Jun 2016 - Aug 2017 · 1 yr 3 mos

    - Develop a stream processing platform using Kafka and Python - Implement reliable ETL pipelines - Improve development and release processes through testing and automation

  • Software Engineer, Intern at TripAdvisor
    May 2015 - Aug 2015 · 4 mos

    - Full-stack Java web development on the Search Engine Optimization team - Implement tests leading to gains of 60 million annual referrals - Enhance maintainability by removing outdated code and improving automated testing