Paul Raff – who goes by Raff – has over 15 years of experience in data science and applied research on top of his PhD education. Here’s a summary of the impact that he has provided in multiple domains and areas.
Principal Data Scientist
Raff joined Reddit in 2021 and had immediate impact with both the Reddit Search product team and Reddit’s Experimentation Platform, DDG.
Raff created the foundation for Search’s data strategy, enabling the Search engineering team and the rest of Reddit to effectively and efficiently utilize its data for maximum insight and business value. In parallel, he architected the modernization of DDG’s analysis platform, enabling experimenters to gain more from their experiments and growing Reddit’s experimentation throughput from tens to hundreds of simultaneous experiments.
Raff is one of only two Principal Data Scientists at Reddit, which is the highest individual contributor role. He is part of Reddit’s technical leadership, and works to make everyone at Reddit better through their values, particularly Default Open.
Principal Data Scientist – Clinical Analytics
Raff came in at a critical time of the development of Next-Generation Transform Diabetes Care (ngTDC) and immediately took ownership of the technical aspects of the core machine learning models underlying the program.
Working alongside Product, Engineering, Sales, and IT, he led a team of 5 Data Scientists to complete the on-time launch of the pilot and the complete Commercial launch, contributing hundreds of millions of dollars of EBIT for CVS Health and providing a solid foundation for how CVS Health and Aetna use data effectively for the management of chronic diseases.
Principal Data Scientist Lead – ExP
Principal Program Manager Lead – COSINE Data
Raff cut his teeth in A/B Experimentation in Microsoft’s ExP org, helping it grow from an organization of 10 to an organization of 150, starting as an individual contributor and ending leading a team of 10.
Raff helped Bing, Windows, Office, Xbox, and other organizations run tens of thousands of A/B experiments and provide simple, effective, and trustworthy analysis and insight.
Raff played instrumental roles in ensuring that experimentation was built into the core of Windows 10, and has created various useful and effective tools to help experimenters understand the results of their experiments and iterate quickly.
Applied Researcher – Supply Chain Optimization
Raff’s contribution to supply chain optimization at Amazon resulted in $60 million dollars of fulfillment savings for Amazon’s network in 2012. Think about what that means for Amazon today.
He did it through a simple and effective technique coined Global Fulfillment Optimization. Building on the patented ideas on fulfillment tie-breaking, he worked with other scientists and engineers to reshape and advance Amazon’s fulfillment strategies to massive effect.
PhD – Mathematics
Raff earned his PhD in Mathematics at Rutgers University in 2009, with a thesis titled Automated Discovery and Proof in Three Combinatorial Problems.
BS, MS – Mathematics
BS – Computer Science
Raff earned his undergraduate degrees at Carnegie Mellon, sharpening and honing his foundational technical skills and vowing by the Andrew Carnegie mantra my heart is in the work.
Raff went to the prestigious North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics, to which he owes a deep debt to.