Ben Knight is a Staff Data Scientist at Instacart with 11 years of experience turning messy terabyte-scale data into actionable product and operations signals using SQL, Python, R and big-data tools. He has progressed through hands-on roles building ETL pipelines, fraud detection for RTB, and ML classifiers in Spark/MLlib, and now shapes analytics and tooling that influence retail and fulfillment decisions. His work blends rigorous statistical training (applied stats certificate, MAs in political science and East Asian studies) with practical engineering—automating monitoring, materialized views, and reproducible analyses at scale. Ben also publishes industry-facing analyses and holds a patent related to in-warehouse item location, reflecting a focus on measurable impact. A former Surface Warfare Officer, he brings disciplined project leadership and ops experience to data problems, and he pairs that with recent graduate-level training in big-data systems to bridge research and production.
11 years of coding experience
5 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Arts (M.A.), East Asian Studies, Master of Arts (M.A.), East Asian Studies at University of California, Berkeley
Master of Computer Science (Big Data Systems), Computer Science, Master of Computer Science (Big Data Systems), Computer Science at Arizona State University
Graduate Certificate, Applied Statistics, Graduate Certificate, Applied Statistics at Penn State University
Master of Arts (M.A.), Political Science and Government, Master of Arts (M.A.), Political Science and Government at University of California, Davis
Bachelor of Arts (B.A.), East Asian Studies and International Relations, Bachelor of Arts (B.A.), East Asian Studies and International Relations at Connecticut College
Write of different approaches to power analysis beyond standard t-tests.
Contributions:10 PRs, 163 pushes, 13 branches in 6 months
t-testsanalysisrisk-assessmentpowerbeyond
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