Junqi (Jack) Chen
Data Science Leader · Marketing Analytics, ML, & Experimentation
Summary
Strategic and results-driven Data Science Leader with extensive experience leading high-performing analytics teams to drive measurable business impact. Proven track record in delivering actionable insights and machine learning solutions that drive revenue growth, customer retention, optimized marketing performance, and enhanced customer experience. Expert in building and mentoring data science teams, establishing robust decision frameworks, and operationalizing ML models in production. Demonstrated success in Conversion Rate Optimization, predictive modeling, Multi Touch Attribution, and experimentation design, translating complex data into strategic business recommendations.
Experience
Senior Manager, Deposits Marketing Analytics, Discover Financial Services · Riverwoods, IL
Jan 2023 — Present
- Lead a globally dispersed team of 4 data scientists supporting acquisition channels, including Direct Marketing ($30MM budget) and Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO); recruit, train, mentor, and promote data science professionals.
- Built and deployed XGBoost targeting models for Savings and CD acquisition — feature engineering through production deployment on Snowflake/AWS — driving $70MM in incremental deposits and 10% efficiency gains; implemented monitoring pipelines for proactive model performance tracking.
- Led incentive offer experimentation (design–analysis–rollout), achieving up to 200% lift on response and 60% reduction in cost per dollar while expanding learnings for future personalization.
- Spearheaded development and alignment of CRO measurement and decisioning framework, enabling faster decisions to optimize the online customer experience and driving over $200MM incremental deposits annually.
- Adopted Bayesian test measurement methodology, cutting test duration by up to 40% while maintaining guardrails on risk and statistical rigor.
- Lead upkeep of an in-house multi-touch attribution workflow; steer monthly reforecasting of growth metrics with Marketing, Finance, and leadership to inform investment decisions.
Manager, Card Portfolio Modeling, Discover Financial Services · Riverwoods, IL
Sep 2020 — Dec 2022
- Developed and implemented credit card attrition models (XGBoost) for retention initiatives and models for Balance Transfer price sensitivity using historical pricing tests.
- Spearheaded uplift modeling POC for Balance Transfer, benchmarking Meta Learners, Uplift Trees, and Outcome Transformation vs. the existing response model; best model showed 10%+ lift.
- Developed credit risk models for the card portfolio using XGBoost, informing credit line and retention decisions across 40MM cardholders.
- Established monitoring frameworks and led quarterly business reviews for sustained model health and proactive retraining.
Principal Data Scientist, Card Acquisition Analytics, Discover Financial Services · Riverwoods, IL
Sep 2019 — Sep 2020
- Analyzed Google DCM impression data to profile prospects across publishers and developed a pioneering view of traffic flow among publishers.
- Built a Markov Chain attribution model; results plus a DMA test informed CPA negotiation with a key publisher ($200K annual savings).
- Identified and assisted remediation of an internal product billing issue that caused over $1MM overpayment.
- Managed funnel performance tracking for the Affiliates channel and analyzed how first-transaction behavior evolved during the pandemic.
Senior Data Scientist, W.W. Grainger · Lake Forest, IL
Jun 2015 — Sep 2019
- Delivered a comprehensive view of drivers of seller performance via regression; proposed actions to improve seller performance based on model results.
- Trained ML models (Random Forest, XGBoost, etc.) to predict customer risk; outputs leveraged by Sales for retention.
- Pioneered seller effectiveness modeling combining NLP-derived Salesforce activity with demographic and performance data for coaching and training strategy.
- Set up automated audience selection in R Server on Hadoop for DM campaigns; reduced modeling turnaround ~30% while improving prediction accuracy.
- Measured ROI of Marketing and Sales investments using A/B testing and observational methods (PSM, DiD, etc.).
Education
- Lehigh University — MS Industrial and Systems Engineering
Bethlehem, PA - Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics — BS Industrial Engineering
Nanjing, China
Skills
- Practice areas: Team leadership & mentorship, Marketing analytics, Revenue forecasting, Conversion rate optimization (CRO), Multi-touch attribution (MTA), Experimentation — Bayesian measurement & A/B testing, Causal inference & uplift modeling, Machine learning — modeling, deployment & monitoring
- Languages & data platforms: Python, SQL, SAS, R, Spark, Git, Snowflake, Tableau, Looker, Airflow, Cursor, Docker, FastAPI
- ML frameworks & cloud: scikit-learn, XGBoost, TensorFlow / Keras, PyTorch, H2O, SageMaker, Lambda