Christopher Gandrud
Director at Spotify
Berlin, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolChristopher Gandrud is a director-level data science and engineering leader with 14 years of experience building high-impact research teams and production systems across personalization, econometrics, and experimentation. Currently leading teams at Spotify to design and evaluate agentic and generative sequential AI for personalization and impression economics, he blends causal inference and Bayesian analysis with large-scale A/B testing and real-time recommendation platforms. Previously he scaled cross-functional organizations at Zalando—bringing causal machine learning into a high-throughput experimentation service and launching a real-time content recommendation system that grew on-site advertising. A former academic with a PhD from LSE, he retains a research-first mindset while shipping production software and self-service research tools. He is also an active open-source contributor, notably extending the networkD3 package to bridge R and D3.js for interactive visualizations, reflecting his full-stack curiosity across analytics and front-end. Based in Berlin, he combines empathy-driven people leadership with technical depth to turn causal science into measurable customer value.
14 years of coding experience
8 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Political Science and Government, Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Political Science and Government at London School of Economics and Political ScienceBachelor of Arts (B.A.) Honours, Political Science and Government, Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) Honours, Political Science and Government at McGill University
German
Stackoverflow
88reputation
3kreached
2answers
2questions
Github Skills (14)
javascript10
d3js10
r10
networking9
r-stats9
shiny9
rs9
network9
net9
graph6
prediction6
cox-regression6
plm6
plot6
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
christophergandrud/networkD3
Aug 2014 - Dec 2017
D3 JavaScript Network Graphs from R
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:1 release, 247 commits, 38 PRs in 3 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Christopher contributed to the development of the `networkD3` package, which involves creating D3.js network graphs from R. The commits reveal work on extending the package to include new features like `simpleNetworkOutput` and `forceNetworkOutput` for Shiny applications. Furthermore, the user worked on the implementation of a Sankey diagram function (`sankeyNetwork`) and its corresponding JavaScript, demonstrating work across both R code (backend) and JavaScript (frontend).
javascriptnetwork-graphnetworksd3jsrstats
christophergandrud/DataCombine
Mar 2013 - Jun 2020
R tools for combining data sets.
Contributions:216 commits, 68 pushes, 15 comments in 7 years 4 months
r-packagedata-setsrstats
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