Toni is available for hire

Toni Vlaic

Verified Expert in Engineering

Software Developer

Location

Zagreb, Croatia

Toptal Member Since

July 24, 2019

Experienced in all phases of the development life cycle, Toni enjoys improving business processes and creating value for his clients. His professional experience ranges from creating REST APIs and web development to enabling his clients to make data-driven decisions using machine learning and data science. Practical and technical knowledge as a developer and a business consultant make Toni extremely capable to work with teams of any size.

Machine Learning Python Pandas Data Analytics Back-end Data Analysis Deep Learning Data Visualization GitHub NumPy SQL ETL Jupyter Snowflake Scikit-learn LightGBM

Portfolio

205 Data Lab

Data Build Tool (dbt), BigQuery, Snowflake, Looker, Apache Airflow, Prefect

Bonsai D.O.O

LightGBM, NumPy, Pandas, PyTorch, Keras, OpenCV, Tableau, Azure, Docker, Django...

Athena Analytics

Data Science, SQLAlchemy, SQL, Matplotlib, LightGBM, Pandas, Python, Docker...

Experience

SQL - 5 years Pandas - 5 years Python - 5 years Data Analysis - 4 years Data Science - 4 years Machine Learning - 3 years Azure - 2 years Django - 2 years

Availability

Part-time

Preferred Environment

CODE, Vim Text Editor, Git, Bash, MacOS, Linux

The most amazing...

...thing I've coded was a model for credit scoring for a regional bank. The model was a 12% improvement and also presented at a Fintech conference in London 2019.

Work Experience

Analytics Engineer

2020 - PRESENT

205 Data Lab

Leveraged a vast client database of company information to create a productized SFDC plugin with KPI descriptors using DBT and Python orchestrated by Airflow.
Performed deep-dive analysis and data cleanup and consolidation of millions of records between clients' product and SFDC instance for easier BI, reporting, and decision making.
Implemented Looker explores to expose BigQuery data to non-technical users in an easy to consume way.

Technologies: Data Build Tool (dbt), BigQuery, Snowflake, Looker, Apache Airflow, Prefect

Data Scientist/Engineer

2019 - PRESENT

Bonsai D.O.O

Served as a data scientist on the data science team.
Created an ML-powered ticket automation plugin for Zendesk and Service Shift platform that auto-assigns tickets and offers automatic response capabilities with predefined macros to reduce ticket response time and improve customer service.
Developed a deep learning model and API for a local car sales company that enables their clients to create professional car photos for their sale ad directly in their parking lot; it improved efficiency and shortened the process of ad creation.
Worked on the implementation and design of ETL pipelines and data modeling of a DWH for a global coffeehouse company to serve as a single source of truth for reporting and analytics.

Technologies: LightGBM, NumPy, Pandas, PyTorch, Keras, OpenCV, Tableau, Azure, Docker, Django, Python, Databricks, Azure Data Factory, Data Build Tool (dbt), Azure Synapse, Machine Learning

Data Scientist

2020 - 2021

Athena Analytics

Transitioned existing models to LightGBM counterparts to improve the handling of missing values.
Worked closely with the engineers and manager to spec out a road map for a career recommendation solution as a future improvement to the system.
Performed research on existing data sets and implemented a recommendation engine in collaboration with psychologists to suggest the best career fit based on a person's psychological and academic traits.
Migrated code to dockers and implemented Linux services to make the solutions easier to scale and manage.

Technologies: Data Science, SQLAlchemy, SQL, Matplotlib, LightGBM, Pandas, Python, Docker, Linux, Scikit-learn, Machine Learning

Data Analyst

2020 - 2020

Toptal Client

Contributed to deep-dives and reporting as a product data analyst.
Collaborated closely with the product managers and engineers to translate business insights into actions and helped define business metrics, product roadmaps, and quarterly OKRs.
Created and supported multiple dashboards on deep-dive using SQL, Python, and Mode Analytics.
Presented actionable insights using Mode Analytics dashboards to managers and engineers to optimize revenue, pricing, and reduce fraudulent activity.
Implemented models in the ETL pipeline that transforms the available data into a standardized single source of truth.

Technologies: Data, Jupyter, NumPy, Scikit-learn, Python, Mode Analytics, BigQuery, SQL

Senior Analyst

2018 - 2019

CantabPI

Led a team during the creation of a marketing optimization tool for a Fortune 50 pharma company. The resulting model was able to quantify the impact of each action on sales and optimize action prioritization and resource management.
Developed a behavioral credit scoring model for a regional bank to reduce credit risk and take advantage of the new PSD2 directive. The model achieved 12% better results than the previous one and was presented at a fintech conference in London, 2019.
Created a capacity management model for a big regional hotel chain owner to predict cancellations and reservations for making overbooking decisions. Hotels filled 100% capacity during prime time while the best previously achieved was 96%.

Technologies: LightGBM, Scikit-learn, NumPy, Pandas, Tableau, Azure, Python, Data Science, Machine Learning

R&D Engineer

2015 - 2017

Span

Worked on the computer vision research and development team.
Developed face recognition and age/emotion detection using deep learning to analyze customers and cross-reference their extracted demographic data with bought consumer goods to gain further insight into behavioural patterns.
Created a signature verification model to detect if a person's signature is genuine (in case they forget which one was used) to speed up the process of approving requests and reduce manual labor.
Created a solution that analyzes the global DNS traffic of a big client with over 300 million requests daily. The solution used outlier detection and statistics to prevent DNS tunneling attacks.

Technologies: LightGBM, Scikit-learn, NumPy, Pandas, Tableau, OpenCV, TensorFlow, Azure, Django, Python, Data Science, Machine Learning

Software Developer

2015 - 2015

Span

Worked in the cloud solutions team.
Collaborated on the creation of an internal survey creator and management website. Developed the website back end in C# and MS SQL which was deployed on Azure cloud services.

Technologies: Microsoft SQL Server, Azure

Experience

Trimmy - Script Creation Application

The application enabled students to create scripts in collaboration with each other from their highlighted book pages. By extracting the areas that were highlighted by their marker the student would be able to quickly generate a Word/PDF document containing only the essential information about the subject he is studying.

Core member of a team competing in AppStart contest responsible for OCR and back-end logic including the export functionalities.

Technologies: Python, Django, Android, Heroku, OpenCV, GoogleAPI

Robust ML Challenge

https://github.com/Mungosin/Mozgalo

Developed a model for classifying images of shopping mall receipts based on their visible logo characteristics. The competition was focused on the robustness of the developed model. Train set consisted of 25 classes among 45,000 labeled images and the test set included new unknown classes to test if the classifier can distinguish between known and unknown receipts.

The developed ensemble of classifiers can process a batch of up to 16 images within 1 second on a regular CPU and has 94% F1 macro metric making it extremely good across all classes.

Technologies: Python, Keras, OpenCV

Extracting Deep Features for Image Recommendation

https://github.com/Mungosin/AVSP

Created a pipeline to compress images into vectors of ~300 dimensions using deep learning models and statistical methods to improve the accuracy and speed of image recommendation engines.

The resulting engine was later to develop a demo recommendation engine application that received the Rector's award for Individual scientific work.

Technologies: Python, Tensorflow, Django, Heroku

Kaggle Expert Competitor

https://www.kaggle.com/mungos

https://www.kaggle.com/c/data-science-bowl-2018
Image Segmentation problem - Detection of Nuclei in Cell Images
Result: 91/3634 - Top 3%
Technologies: Python, Keras, OpenCV

https://www.kaggle.com/c/traveling-santa-2018-prime-paths
Traveling Salesman Problem
Result: 42/1871 - Top 3%
Technologies: Python, Numba

https://www.kaggle.com/c/talkingdata-adtracking-fraud-detection
Detecting fraudulent click traffic
Result: 308/3946 - Top 8%
Technologies: Python, LightGBM, Scikit-Learn, Pandas

https://www.kaggle.com/c/home-credit-default-risk
Developing a Credit Scoring model
Result: 459/7190 - Top 7%
Technologies: Python, LightGBM, Scikit-Learn, Pandas

Web Scraper

Created a web scraper to index blog posts and automatically detect copied content and extract links to copied content to an Excel worksheet for easier DMCA request sending.

Technologies: Python, Selenium

Education

2016 - 2018

Master's Degree in Computer Science

University of Zagreb - Zagreb, Croatia

2013 - 2016

Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science

University of Zagreb - Zagreb, Croatia

Skills

Libraries/APIs

Pandas, NumPy, Matplotlib, Scikit-learn, Keras, REST APIs, SQLAlchemy, PyTorch, OpenCV, TensorFlow

Tools

Jupyter, GitHub, Git, Apache Airflow, Plotly, BigQuery, Looker, Tableau

Languages

Python, Snowflake, SQL, Bash

Frameworks

Django, LightGBM, Django REST Framework, Flask

Paradigms

Data Science, ETL, Object-oriented Programming (OOP), Continuous Integration (CI), Continuous Deployment

Storage

PostgreSQL, Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL

Platforms

Jupyter Notebook, Databricks, Azure Synapse, Linux, OS X, Azure, Docker

Other

Machine Learning, Google BigQuery, Data, Data Analytics, APIs, Back-end, Deep Learning, Data Visualization, Data Preprocessing, Data Analysis, Data Build Tool (dbt), Mode Analytics, API Integration, Azure Data Factory, Prefect, Web Development

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