Dan Houghton
Verified Expert in Engineering
Startups Developer
London, United Kingdom
Toptal member since February 12, 2020
Dan is a data-driven executive, with a Double First in Maths from Cambridge. He started and sold TextMagic.com, worked as a Product Manager at Skype during its hyper-growth phase, then founded a restaurant group, Chilango, where he installed modern business intelligence and did the data engineering and business analysis himself. He is now taking contract roles in data leadership positions in scale-ups in London.
Portfolio
Experience
- Communication - 15 years
- Leadership - 15 years
- Startups - 15 years
- Finance - 5 years
- SQL - 4 years
- Redshift - 3 years
- R - 3 years
- Domo - 3 years
Availability
Preferred Environment
SQL, Databricks, Redshift, RStudio, Domo, Tableau, Looker
The most amazing...
...experience was winning a silver medal in my first competition on Kaggle where we analyzed a Google Merchandise Store dataset to predict revenue per customer.
Work Experience
Head of Data (interim)
City Pantry
- Restructured the data team to a hybrid decentralized model, as part of making the company more data-driven.
- Rolled out Looker and a new data warehouse, powered by DBT. I led the team and actively wrote SQL and LookML code myself.
- Built a new customer-centric data product using DBT and Looker. I created a customer event stream from a dozen data sources and built a tool to visualize it.
Co-CEO and Data Scientist
Chilango
- Changed the culture from one where gathering data was a pain, to one where BI was readily accessible to everyone, and used in decision making.
- Built our BI stack with the help of an outsourced data engineering partner. I wrote most of the SQL transforms myself.
- Trained and mentored one of our operations managers into our first BI analyst.
- Researched and built our property model in R, using data from the UK Census and a third-party geo-data provider.
Experience
Kaggle Silver Medal: Google Analytics Customer Revenue Prediction
https://www.kaggle.com/c/ga-customer-revenue-prediction/discussion/81639Education
Master of Philosophy Degree in Computer Speech and Language Processing
University of Cambridge - Cambridge, England
Bachelor's Degree in Mathematics
University of Cambridge - Cambridge, England
Certifications
Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence for Managers
Udemy
Executive Data Science
Coursera
Skills
Tools
Domo, Looker, Tableau
Languages
R, SQL, Python
Storage
Redshift, PostgreSQL
Platforms
RStudio, Jupyter Notebook, Databricks
Other
Startups, Communication, Leadership, Finance, Data Science, Machine Learning
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