Brenda L. Smith

At Best Egg, our team leverages advanced AI/ML algorithms to drive financial innovation and customer success. I am a Lead Data Scientist working on credit risk modeling for the Flexible Rent platform, which allows users to pay their rent over multiple payments. A large part of our work involves engineering features with alternative data to create next-generation redecisioning models for credit applications. I have over nine years of professional experience in software engineering, data engineering, cloud infrastructure, and distributed systems, and I am graduating with a M.S. in Data Science from UT Austin in December 2024. Working for leading cloud providers such as Microsoft Azure and AWS EC2, I have deployed highly scalable, reliable, and secure solutions for core systems that are part of the backbone of AWS and Azure. I am a contributor to the Apache Software Foundation Zookeeper and Ambari projects. At AWS I created a Data Lake for the EC2 core team, ingesting organizational data using AWS Glue and PySpark, and using machine learning to discover business insights which drove large improvements in service efficiency and ultimately led to significant cost savings.