Joe Saia
Engineering Leader & PhD Economist
West Orange, NJ · 518-530-8318 · joe5saia@gmail.com
github.com/joe5saia · linkedin.com/in/joe-saia · joesaia.com
Engineering and analytics leader with 10+ years building data platforms, production systems, and high-autonomy teams. Specializes in hiring and developing high-agency team members and using AI tooling to deliver outsized business impact.
Experience
Rhythm Management Group · VP of Engineering
Apr 2025 – Mar 2026- Reporting to the CEO, built and led a 26-person org spanning product engineering, platform engineering, QA, IT, and Salesforce analysts
- Co-owned the BI stack (Snowflake + Fivetran + Sigma) with VP of Finance; moved executive reporting to self-serve dashboards and established source-of-truth metrics
- Implemented Salesforce Omnichannel routing; measured a 35% productivity lift
- Hands-on contributor averaging 2–5 production PRs per week: built Python ETL for claims data into Salesforce and Snowflake, automating reconciliation and enabling claims funnel measurement
Rhythm Management Group · Director of Engineering
May 2024 – Apr 2025- Transformed a waterfall-in-disguise team into a high-agency agile org that shipped against customer pain points in days, not quarters
- Drove 99%+ uptime, moved releases from quarterly to bi-weekly, and consolidated backend services for 30% lower cloud spend
- Insourced key IT functions to improve reliability, security posture, and data governance
Perry Health · Senior Manager of Data and Engineering
May 2022 – May 2024- Reporting to the COO, owned the EHR web app and data infrastructure using Python and React; led a cross-functional team of engineers and data scientists across NY and EU
- Built acquisition-to-enrollment funnel (Rudderstack, GA4, Tableau), instrumented events, and ran A/B tests to improve conversion
- Built claims processing pipeline managing $1.5M per year enabling a two-person team; maintained industry-leading 74% collections rate
- Shipped data integrations (Abbott, Dexcom, SureScripts) to improve clinical decision-making
Perry Health · Data Scientist
Dec 2021 – May 2022- Migrated Python ETLs to Fivetran and dbt SQL on Redshift, enabling faster iteration
- Maintained comprehensive company-wide reporting on all business aspects using Looker, driving data-informed decision-making supporting $35 million Series A
Revelio Labs · Machine Learning Engineer
May 2021 – Dec 2021- Engineered AWS EMR + PySpark pipeline to process one million LinkedIn profiles daily
- Trained ensemble model to standardize employer names across the full universe of LinkedIn profiles
Federal Reserve Board of Governors · Senior Research Assistant
Oct 2014 – Jul 2016- Designed 45 TB data lake housing NYSE exchange data augmented with internally developed indicators
Education
PhD Economics · Columbia University
Aug 2016 – May 2021MSc Economics · University College London
Sep 2013 – Sep 2014BS Physics and Economics · Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Aug 2009 – May 2013Technical Skills
Languages: SQL, Python, R, Julia, Golang, TypeScript, Node.js, React
Experimentation & Inference: A/B test design, power analysis, CUPED, stratification, uplift modeling, DML, causal forests
AI Tools: Claude Code, Codex, Amp, GitHub Copilot, Pi
Data Platforms: Snowflake, Redshift, dbt, Fivetran, AWS EMR, Spark, Lambda
Visualization & BI: Tableau, Looker, Sigma, executive storytelling and self-serve dashboards
Event & Funnel Analytics: attribution, conversion, retention, Google Analytics (GA4)