Data ScientistOpen to relocating anywhere in the US

Hi, I'm
Kabilan Senapathy

Kabilan Senapathy in the mountains in autumn

I'm a data scientist in advertising at Paramount, building the ML models and causal measurement behind real-time ad bidding, yield and audience identity. Outside work, I ship AI products, like Recall, a memory app on the App Store.

6+ years in data science, building software since 2015. MS in Data Science. Based in Seattle.

I'm fascinated by randomness in data and in nature. Passionate about On-Device ML and WebML.

Experience

Data Scientist · Paramount

May 2022 - Present

4B/day

ad requests in scope for the bid-success model

3.9×

bid rate in the model's top 10% of predictions

Average
Top 10%

9% → 80%

of ad requests carrying a prediction, after the fixes

Before
After
  • Measured the revenue impact of identity signals in programmatic advertising with a cohort-based difference-in-differences design, where A/B testing wasn't possible. Featured in the CTO's 2024 top tech accomplishments and presented company-wide.
  • Sole data scientist on a real-time bid-success model for about 4 billion ad requests a day. Built explainable by design (SparkML, MLflow); its top 10% of predictions drew bids 3.9x as often as average. Replaced a leaky random split with a time-based one, reporting a lower but honest AUC.
  • Traced why only 9% of ad requests carried a model prediction to a storage issue in another team's system; after the fixes, coverage reached 80%.
  • Created the session-depth methodology now used in ad platform reporting, and recommended the identity resolution order now in production model serving.
  • Defined advertiser churn with the Sales VP, adopted by Sales, and built SHAP-explained churn models.
  • Mentored two summer interns through to shipped data quality tools, including scoping the problem and plan for one of them.

Data Science Associate · iCreditWorks

Feb 2020 - May 2022

$250K/yr

saved by automating daily financial reconciliation

  • Automated daily financial reconciliation with fault-tolerant Airflow pipelines, saving about $250K a year.
  • Built real-time executive dashboards on credit profiles, product performance and conversion for the CEO, CFO and CTO.

MS, Data Science · New Jersey Institute of Technology

2018 - 2019
  • Graduate coursework in machine learning, deep learning, statistics and data visualization. Projects are listed under Academic Projects below.

Co-Founder · Algorism Labs

2017 - 2018
  • AI startup for small and mid-size businesses. Built a property rating and matching algorithm and a custom real-estate ERP.

Lead Software Developer · Lands and Lands Ventures

2015 - 2017
  • Built ERP, CRM and analytics covering 6K+ properties and 10K+ customers.

Things I've Built

Recall: The Memory App↗

Launched on the App Store in June 2026 · Built solo

A memory journal you can ask questions in plain English. The iOS and macOS app tags memories on device with Apple's NLTagger. The backend runs a RAG pipeline: pgvector search over OpenAI embeddings, LLM query rewriting, keyword and date passes, and expansion through linked memories, streamed back over SSE.

Flutter
Swift
Django
Postgres + pgvector
OpenAI

147

users

929

memories saved

5.0★

App Store rating

Stratrent↗

Data-driven rent negotiation · Launched March 2026

A free calculator that shows whether renewing a lease or moving saves more money, comparing real monthly costs, moving expenses and landlord concessions side by side.

Next.js
TypeScript

On-Device ML

Three levels of ML, running entirely in your browser

Is your device ML ready?

…

demos can run on this device

  • Pure Mathready
  • TensorFlow.jschecking
  • LLMchecking
CPU

…

- logical cores

Memory

-

Not exposed by this browser

Network

-

Not exposed by this browser

GPU

…

WebGPU checking · WebGL checking

Writing

All posts on Medium

Reading

Reading now

  • Why Machines Learn: The Elegant Math Behind Modern AI

    Anil Ananthaswamy

    My current coffee-table read, with great formulas and explanations.

  • OpenIntro Statistics

    David Diez, Mine Çetinkaya-Rundel and Christopher Barr

    My daily practice book: I solve one problem a day.

Read

  • The Hindu Speaks on Scientific Facts, Vols. 1 & 2

    The Hindu

    Where my deepest love for science began, as a teenager.

  • How to Lie with Statistics

    Darrell Huff

    A great first book for building a reading habit as a data scientist.

  • Hypothesis Testing: A Visual Introduction to Statistical Significance

    Scott Hartshorn

    My coffee-desk read for building a technical reading habit.

Skills

Languages & Data

PythonSQLPySparkJavaScript / TypeScript

ML & Statistics

Causal inference (difference-in-differences)Quasi-experimental designSparkML, scikit-learnTensorFlow, PyTorchModel explainability (SHAP)

GenAI & On-Device

RAG (pgvector, OpenAI embeddings)Vertex AI, GeminiTensorFlow.js, WebLLMApple NaturalLanguage

Platforms

Databricks, MLflowGCP (BigQuery)AWS, AzureApache Airflow, Docker, Git

Apps & Visualization

Flutter, DjangoNext.js, ReactPowerBI, Looker StudioMatplotlib, D3.js

Academic Projects

MS, Data Science · New Jersey Institute of Technology · 2018 - 2019

Machine Learning

  • Single Nucleotide Polymorphism Classification2018

    Used ensemble methods to classify single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) genotype data (synthetic) of 4,000 cases and 4,000 controls. The data had 29,623 features, of which only 15 were causal. Used PCA to reduce dimensionality and achieved a Top-1 accuracy of 66.2%.

  • Adaptive Step Size - Hinge Loss and Least Squares Loss2018

    Developed a single-layer neural network in Python and implemented an adaptive learning rate for gradient descent. Applied it to both hinge loss and least squares loss and studied the effect of the learning rate on convergence.

    View project

Deep Learning

  • Kaggle Dataset - Image Classification2019

    Developed multiple Convolutional Neural Network classifiers in Keras for a wide range of Kaggle image classification datasets.

  • Mini-ImageNet Classification2019

    Developed a 5-layer CNN for Mini-ImageNet classification with a minimum accuracy target of 80%. Used 50% dropout on every layer, an unusually high value that performed well, and studied the effect of high dropout during training.

Medical AI

  • Feature Space Transformation for Multi-Modality Data2019

    Built a transformer that maps data from multiple unknown distributions into a known feature space. A single common model can then serve data from different modalities, reducing development time and engineering effort.

Data Visualization

  • Visualization for Data Discovery in Open Data Portals (Discovery)2019

    Helps users visually understand the links between arbitrary datasets and what information those links provide (e.g., linking datasets A, D and C might provide less information than linking datasets G, D and F).

    View project