About

Christopher Skeels is a Lead Data Scientist and Machine Learning Engineer at Square, where he is responsible for leading the Diner Data Science team for Square's Caviar food ordering service. With over 18 years of experience in the field, he has a strong background in ML, research science, and data science. Prior to joining Square, Christopher was the Associate Director of Research Software Engineering at RAND, where he supervised 12 research software engineer direct reports. He was responsible for recruiting, mentoring, salary negotiation, and performance reviews. During his tenure, he developed Weatherbin.com for NASA research grant, which involved using Python/scikit-learn for machine learning and JavaScript/D3 for visualization. He also led the "Social Media Data for Policy Research" initiative at RAND, where he built analysis tools and a self-service portal for researchers to access DataSift and Twitter GNIP providers. Christopher also proposed and developed various technology & methods grants under RAND's internal research program, including a Cross-Platform Mobile App Toolkit and Applications of IBM Watson to Policy Research. In addition to his professional experience, Christopher has also created the Blanqd mobile app on iOS and Android, which he built using PhoneGap, Sencha, Python/NTLK, Node, and MySQL. The app includes app code, NLP for quiz game content, AWS-hosted daily content and rankings server, and graphic design of the app and launch page. Christopher earned his Master of Science in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2006. He is skilled in various technologies, including AWS, NLP, Python, Mobile, MySQL, QA, Software Engineer, Spark, Scikit, Big Data, test, Javascript, iOS, and Web.