Elias Ponvert
Lead Data Scientist
Austin, Texas, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolElias Ponvert is a Lead Data Scientist in Austin with 16 years of experience building production ML systems, leading teams, and bridging product needs with pragmatic, well-tested solutions. His career spans targeted roles at Target and Indeed where he drove query understanding, embeddings-based retrieval, and relevance modeling for large-scale search and recommendation systems. Grounded in a PhD in Linguistics from UT Austin, Elias combines deep expertise in language technology and unsupervised grammar induction with hands-on engineering—having built prediction APIs, Spark pipelines, and scalable indexing and retrieval systems. He is as comfortable mentoring and running training programs as he is designing evaluation tooling and production APIs, and often focuses on aligning cutting-edge research with operational constraints. A less obvious strength is his long history of work across both academic NLP research and enterprise-grade search architectures, which helps him translate linguistic insight into robust product features.
16 years of coding experience
13 years of employment as a software developer
PhD Linguistics, PhD Linguistics at The University of Texas at AustinBA Linguistics, BA Linguistics at McGill University
Stackoverflow
26reputation
215reached
1answer
0questions
Github Skills (46)
data-stream10
apache9
r9
java9
text-processing9
streaming9
python8
sql8
big-data8
scala8
spark8
jdbc7
database6
machine-learning6
guice6
Programming languages (5)
Github contributions (5)
peoplepattern/lemkit
Dec 2014 - Apr 2017
Contributions:36 commits, 6 pushes, 1 branch in 2 years 4 months
peoplepattern/lib-text
Dec 2015 - Mar 2016
Contributions:3 releases, 66 commits, 21 PRs in 3 months
processing-libraryscalatext-processing
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