Internships

Decathlon

Data Scientist Apprentice · September 2017–August 2018 · Lille, France

For those who don't know, Decathlon is a French sporting goods retailer, and a huge one. Around the time I was there, it had more than 90,000 employees and around 1,600 stores and outlets. It also does an unusual amount of work itself, from product design and logistics to retail, IT, and data science. My office was tucked behind a massive store in Lille, so I could stare at product SKUs on my screen and then walk a few steps to meet the actual shoes and rugby gear. I loved that.

My main projects:

Marketing attribution: an in-house Shapley-value model that shared conversion credit across combinations of marketing touchpoints.
Product clustering: a large, sparsified catalog graph where products were nodes and co-views and co-purchases formed weighted edges. Graph similarity and clustering powered an internal product explorer without hand-written rules.

Internal tool showing a cluster of related sporting goods around a selected product.

Degree and edge-weight distributions for the product graph.

Sales forecasting: a multi-step CatBoost model using past sales, promotions, holidays, and weather. It beat expert forecasts.

Deloitte

Consultant Intern · April 2016–August 2017 · Luxembourg

I joined the Luxembourg office and quickly collected a small alphabet soup: AML, CTF, KYC, PEP, PSD2. Somehow, I also got to write code.

My main project:

DKYC: helped the early team prototype Deloitte Know Your Counterparties, a web platform for KYC onboarding and ongoing monitoring. I worked on AML and CTF features plus politically exposed person name matching for financial institutions.

Fewer rugby shirts, many more acronyms.