Dan Raz Email & Phone Number

New York, Ny, Us

Seattle, Wa, Us

I am a single threaded leader for a new brand advertising initiative. In this role, I obsess over helping advertisers reach their upper funnel goals. Previously, I developed performance-first, machine-learning (ML) solutions that work with and without user identity. I also worked on user's ad response prediction, with a particular focus on features.Finally, I launched a new experimentation platform that removes common experimental confounders, thereby providing greater confidence that experimental results will correspond to post-launch outcomes

New York, New York , Us

In 2019 I was tasked to lead a 10-member global Agile team (Product Managers, Analysts, Taxonomists) and oversee a suite of five supply chain products that register, manage, analyze, explore, and distribute Viacom intellectual properties (IP) across 30+ brands and 170+ networks (700M subscribers globally). My day-to-day role included facilitating Product/Engineering tech discussions, driving alignment on priorities and timeliness across the Product team, and managing a CapEx budget. It takes a village to accomplish these things, and a large portion of my role was to create a vision and ensure Editorial, Operations, Product, Engineering, Legal, and third parties are aligned. So, I listened, asked questions, provided direction, empowered, and created accountability to a talented Agile team.

New York, Ny, Us

I was promoted to lead a 20-member organization (product, engineering, content, taxonomy) tasked with identifying cost savings and new revenue opportunities for Viacom’s video IP through machine learning (ML). This included partnering with internal teams to develop strategic vision, evaluate ML capabilities for various domains, measure potential ROI, and lead build of POCs and production ML systems to determine viability of technologies for new use cases and revenue value.Project highlights: • Led development of a tool used to prepare videos for third-party distribution that reduced costs by $3M annually and improved distribution turnaround by 80%. • Partnered with ML start-ups, top enterprise providers, and research universities to benchmark state of the art offerings and influenced their roadmaps to meet Viacom’s objectives.• Instituted a governed Viacom-wide data model and content description lingua-franca through creation of an 8K term/62K synonym taxonomy that promotes integrations, content discovery, and data sharing between traditionally disparate groups.• Experimented with crowdsourcing to enrich and validate essential data points and reduce reliance on manual curation and supplement ML techniques. The approach is comparable to experts at 50% of the cost and dramatic improvements to delivery.• Combined ML from off-the-shelf video/text analysis tools and manual human curators to deconstruct content and identify moments that resonate with viewers. Oversaw human curation teams in viewing and marking-up content for training ML algorithms. These techniques are used to optimize marketing, personalization, scheduling, content acquisition, and ad placements, with projected $200M ROI. The solution is powered by a graph database, Spark, NLP (natural language processing) techniques, ML for vision, and other goodies.

New York, Ny, Us

I was hired as a Product Manager and promoted to the Director role in 2015. As Director, I managed a portfolio of products that ingest, manage, catalog, integrate, and serve consumers both owned and licensed content for all Viacom brands (e.g., MTV, Comedy Central, Nickelodeon, BET International, etc.) in the US and abroad. I was responsible for defining roadmaps and built and managed an 11-member team of Product Managers, Business Analysts, and Data Stewards. Project highlights:• Spearheaded development of new functionality for bespoke CMS to meet the unique publishing needs of Viacom’s digital experiences and syndication partners (>90M queries/day, ~700 consumer outlets/partners served). Migrated ~20M records and decommissioned 20 year-old CMS. • Increased digital consumers’ engagement by introducing ability for consumers to localize content. The feature was activated by 30% of international digital users upon launch.• Expedited app launches by 60% through integrations of supply chain systems and automation. Used Omniture consumer behavioral analytics tools to provide data-driven content strategy. • Managed product owners responsible for two critical products, Noise (manages ingests, legal rights, encoding, and distribution of ~500K music videos/metadata to digital consumer outlets) and Global Content Catalog (inventory of Viacom IP for systematized tracking of content and performance across systems and distribution channels).

New York, New York, Us

In this role, I served as Product Manager for an analytics platform that processed data from 4M patients and $1.4B in transactions.Project highlights:• Implemented one of the largest clinical analytics platforms in the US. Collected pain points from clinical stakeholders across all departments and worked with EMR technical implementation team to balance system modifications and user research needs. Team produced the first >120 unique analytics reports.• Reduced financial reports production time by 66% and billing charge lag by 75%. Supervised three data analysts and automated compilation of data points by implementing Cognos warehouse and reports.

New York, Ny, Us

At GA I taught product methodologies to 40+ bootcamp students in two, 10-week course offerings. Classes were typically ~20 students and topics included market analysis, building a business case, building & managing a roadmap, specifications gathering, feature prioritization, user stories, wireframes, storyboards, usability, and Agile development.

Satellite Beach, Florida, Us

Word of mouth of my technical and product skills got me into some freelance work.Highlights:• Developed a speech-to-text system to transcribe class notes for students. System was entered into entrepreneurship competition at Harvard Business School.• Developed a general purpose, fully customizable computer-based-learning system that allowed administrators to design multimedia-based questions+answers, and calculate individuals' scores. System was submitted as part of a larger bid for a citywide NYC healthcare contract.

New York, Ny, Us

At Columbia Law, I wireframed, designed, and implemented multi-tiered web applications, databases, and reports. Project work included an internship-matching app and an internal social network (pre-Facebook), primarily built using a Java stack (JSP, Servlets, Struts 2, Hibernate, Oracle, Informix) and JavaScript.

Cofounders and I executed on a plan to optimize the queue at the doctor's office / urgent care facilities based on patients' symptoms, perceived severity, and medical staff's real-time availability. I was responsible for overseeing the implementation of a full-stack prototype that utilized Bayesian statistics.This resonated with some industry leaders -- MedVolution was the proud recipient of a Wharton Venture Award and a member of the Wharton Venture Initiation Program (at University of Pennsylvania, Wharton Business School).(not affiliated with current medvolution.com)

New York, Ny, Us

Studied computational methods for large-scale genome analysis. (e.g., Hidden Markov Models, Maximum Likelihood Estimation, etc.)

Tel Aviv, Il

Unit 8200 is a leading technical intelligence agency worldwide and stands on a par with the NSA in everything but scale. I served as a programmer on a Rapid Application Development (RAD) team aiming to solve targeted, mission-specific challenges. Projects' development timelines ranged from a few weeks to several months of development. The tech stack included Java, JavaScript, Delphi, .NET, C, C++, Oracle, and SQL Server

Ba, Computer Science

Leading Through Financial Excellence

Ma (Incomplete) Biomedical Informatics, Computational Genomics