What is a Field Data Scientist & What Do We Do? - Ekata
Ekata is part of the Mastercard family. Ekata's solutions provide the most predictive and frictionless identity verification.

Ekata is part of the Mastercard family. Ekata's solutions provide the most predictive and frictionless identity verification.

What are Field Data Scientists?

Ekata’s team of field data scientists (FDS) helps customers return the best possible value from our solutions. Customers meet a member of the FDS team at multiple points during the sales cycle and that relationship continues throughout their account life cycle at Ekata.

So who are we? We’re a globally distributed team with people in Seattle, Amsterdam and Singapore. Team members have worked as data scientists or engineers in the past, solving customer challenges ranging from mobile marketing, bioinformatics and genetics, risk analysis, and natural language processing (NLP) for cognitive contract management.

Field data scientists are typically introduced to a product, data analytics or data science team once a potential customer wants to talk about evaluating Ekata data. If you’re a potential customer, you can expect an Ekata field data scientist to ask a lot of questions about your current workflow, data and your business goals. Our goal is to understand our customers as much as possible to make the best recommendations for how to use our data. Once we get this information, we create a joint test plan documenting what we have learned and a plan for the data evaluation. After we agree on a plan, we can move forward and receive your data!

When Field Data Scientists Begin

Once the field data scientists get the data, that’s when the real challenge solving begins (especially for the data nerds on our team)! We take the data inputs you pass and run a batch to collect all of the responses you would have gotten for that API at the point at which the action happened (e.g. transaction occurred or account was created). After we have those requests, we use the labels and other analysis data you provide to assess how our signals correlate with your data and can be used in either a model- or rules-based scenario to improve your business. We then use a variety of techniques including a variety of rules optimization methodologies, feature engineering and several other cutting-edge analysis techniques (we love learning new things) to help our customers best leverage our data.

The field data scientists view your company’s counterparts as our partners by staying in touch while being as transparent as possible. We also ask that you do the same, to the extent that you are allowed. With more transparency, the better the partnership, the better the results you can achieve.

Throughout this process, our field data scientists focus on simulating what our data would look like in your production environment so you understand what to expect if you decide to integrate and use our data to make decisions.

If you are interested in more of our work, feel free to get in touch with our sales team! They can get in touch and we can all talk about how Ekata data can help solve your problems.

Author

Sarah Strano

Sarah Strano

Field Data Science Manager, Seattle

Sarah has a varied background starting as in oceanography and moving into the tech world, working as a data scientist with financial services startups, mobile marketing and even mobile video games. Sarah loves solving big data problems, particularly around how to do complex math on distributed systems!

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