About

Joshua Hayes is a highly skilled and experienced data scientist, researcher, software engineer, BI analyst, teacher, and public speaker with over 10 years of experience in large-scale statistical analysis. He is classically trained in research methodology and has worked with great teams to envision, design, build, and launch numerous software solutions for some of the biggest names in med-tech and the music industry. Joshua has a wide range of knowledge and expertise that has helped him specialize in diving in, quickly assessing, and navigating data lakes to produce clear and actionable analytics, data visualizations, and AI-tools to guide business decisions. He is also passionate about effectively communicating key insights to both technical and non-technical audiences. Currently, Joshua is a data scientist at Spotify where he empowers content-creators to make data-driven decisions to best grow and develop their careers. He is responsible for R&D for on-platform quantitative tools, supporting the Spotify for Artists team by designing and administering experiments, exploratory ML model development and assessment, creating functional prototypes of cutting edge analytical tools that operate on big data, conducting ad-hoc investigations and analyses on listener behavior, creator strategies, and market trends, and instrumenting web-user behavior metrics to create analytical datasets for downstream use. Prior to Spotify, Joshua served as a Senior Machine Learning Engineer at Manifold where he created best-in-class software solutions for partnering global companies. He was responsible for identifying partner needs and connecting them to concrete deliverables, system design, continuous integration software development, training and evaluating machine learning models, deploying products at scale, producing user-interfaces and visualizations that are satisfying and effective, and clear communication of both high-level views and fine-grained details. Joshua has also worked as a Data Scientist at Chartmetric, a profitable start-up that tracks 2.1 million artists, 1.2 million playlists, and 250k curators across 15+ data sources to create market intelligence and provide data to record labels, distributors, and artist management companies for a monthly subscription. He pioneered multiple original-concept products that have become major features of a SaaS B2B company with over a $2M dollar annual-run-rate and led numerous projects from initial concept/design through development, testing, and deployment. Joshua holds a Doctor of Philosophy - PhD in Sociology from the University of California, Davis, a Master's Degree in Sociology from the same university, a Master of Arts in Religious Studies - Sociology of Religion from Stanford University, and