I’m thrilled to announce today that Diana Pfeil has joined the Pex team as our Vice President of Research and Development. Diana will play an instrumental part in our evolution, leading our machine learning team and working across the organization to identify customers’ business needs and translate them into well-engineered solutions.
Diana brings more than 15 years of experience as a leader in data science, operations research, and machine learning. I love her passion for the work and her ability to leverage data to optimize for efficiency. She has long been a person I knew could help Pex achieve our goal of bringing attribution to the Internet.
Diana joins Pex by the way of Honey by PayPal, where she served as a data scientist focused on e-commerce and lending solutions. Before that, Diana spent a decade working with start-ups, including serving as Lumo’s Chief Technology Officer, where she led the team that developed the company’s predictive flight delay machine learning engine. Early in her career, she was an engineer on the personalization team at Amazon, where she helped develop their Behavior Based Search capabilities and conducted R&D on new features.
Since earning her Ph.D from MIT’s top-ranked Operations Research Center, Diana has become a fixture in Colorado’s burgeoning tech scene, teaching machine learning at the University of Colorado at Denver and organizing events such as Women in Data Science & Machine Learning Boulder and Boulder Startup Week. I admire her dedication to teaching others and lifting up her peers as well as the next generation of data scientists.
Beyond her obvious qualifications and expertise, Diana and I also hail from the same 700-person village in Slovakia — so you could say we’ve been destined to work together from the start.
Her enthusiasm for start-up culture and taking on difficult challenges really shines through. In her words “I love the unique energy of startups in the growth stage, where we are all working together to chase a huge opportunity, and we need every single person’s contribution in order to succeed. Pex is right at the cutting edge of what is happening in the industry and I’m very excited to tackle the hard problems the machine learning and research teams are looking to solve.”
Diana will lead the team responsible for the full research and development lifecycle — from collaborating on new research initiatives, to working on deploying machine learning systems. Their crucial work impacts how media is used across the internet, through music, image and video detection and categorization, focusing on both speed and precision. The team consists of people working in various specialty research and engineering domains including machine learning, deep learning, computer vision, music information retrieval, digital signal processing, statistics, algorithm development, high-performance computing, Python, and C++ software engineering.
It’s an exciting time to be at Pex, and bringing on strong leaders like Diana will ensure that we’re able to sustain our success for the long term. Welcome to the team Diana!
Interested in joining our growing team? We have several open roles, take a look here.
