Mara Elise Donovan

Profile

Senior Data Scientist with 7 years building and deploying machine learning models in fintech and e-commerce environments. Specializes in NLP, customer churn prediction, and real-time recommendation systems using Python and cloud-native MLOps stacks. Reduced annual customer acquisition cost by 31% at Verdant Financial through a propensity-scoring model adopted across four business units.

Work Experience

Senior Data ScientistMar 2021 - Present

Verdant Financial Technologies, Austin, TX

Engineered a gradient-boosted churn-prediction model on 4.2 M customer records, lifting 90-day retention by 18% and saving an estimated $6.4 M annually.
Built an end-to-end MLOps pipeline on AWS SageMaker that cut model deployment time from 11 days to under 6 hours across 12 production models.
Mentored 3 junior data scientists and established a peer code-review process that reduced post-deployment model drift incidents by 40%.

Data ScientistJun 2018 - Feb 2021

Cartograph Commerce, Denver, CO

Developed a real-time product recommendation engine using collaborative filtering and BERT-based embeddings, increasing average order value by 22% on 800 K monthly active users.
Conducted A/B tests across 14 pricing experiments, synthesizing results into executive dashboards that directly informed a $12 M merchandising strategy.
Reduced feature engineering runtime by 65% by migrating batch ETL workflows from pandas to PySpark on Databricks, processing 50 GB of clickstream data daily.

Junior Data AnalystAug 2016 - May 2018

Halcyon Research Group, Chicago, IL

Automated weekly KPI reporting for 6 client accounts using Python and Tableau, cutting manual reporting hours from 14 to 2 per week.
Built logistic regression and random forest classifiers to segment survey respondents, improving client targeting precision by 29%.
Cleaned and merged datasets from 5 disparate sources totaling 900 K rows, reducing downstream data-quality errors flagged by clients by 73%.

Skills

Python (scikit-learn, XGBoost, PyTorch) · SQL & dbt · AWS SageMaker & MLflow · Spark / Databricks · NLP & Transformer Models (BERT, HuggingFace) · A/B Testing & Causal Inference · Tableau & Looker · Feature Engineering & Data Pipelines · AWS Certified Machine Learning – Specialty (2022)

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