Kevin Just

Background

Hi there! I'm a data scientist and AI engineer with a passion for building data products. I moved to San Francisco in 2012 and it has been quite a ride on the professional side. I've gotten to play key roles in global-scale product launches like TikTok Shop US and Facebook's Audience Network, successful exits like LiveRail, and also epic collapses like the Wish IPO. I've relished being a fly on the wall, and have taken away many lessons as to what makes a great product and a successful company.

My biggest hobby outside of work is fantasy baseball!—I play in several high stakes leagues and spend my free time turning my projection models and recommendations into a website www.lineupwiz.com . My projects and freelance page have more details about the software I've built.

Outside of the data world and family, backpacking and hiking are my favorite things to do. My current favorite place to backpack is anywhere I can make it to in the Sierras. The picture with my dogs is of a hike near my home in the 'Big Empty' area of the Marin Headlands north of San Francisco.

Professional Highlights

Most of my career has been in some form of Ecommerce and Ad Tech, and as I mentioned I've found myself in the midst of infamous acquisitions, IPOs, meme stocks, and rocket ships!

• Launching and building a new ad product (Audience Network) at Facebook from $2M → $100M revenue in under 1 year. This product was widely used, and even had some consequence, in the 2016 election. (2014-2017)
• Being part of an acquisition by Facebook in 2014 (LiveRail) in the first place. I got to move to London with my young family as we rebuilt LiveRail into FB's “Audience Network for Video” ad product. (2013-2014)
• Building up Ads Monetization data science at Twitch in San Francisco. (2018-2020)
• Living through an absolutely epic meme stock IPO meltdown at Wish. (2020-2023)
• Hyperscaling the first User Growth data science team amidst the chaotic launch of US TikTok Shop. (2023-2024)

I learned a ton from working in so many diverse organizations. Along the way, I developed ideas about what good data science, ML, data engineering, and product analytics looks like. Go to my resume page if you want to hear more 🙂.

Illustration of 1 to 2 versus 1 to 0

Meta (Facebook) 🚀🚀

Wish (LOGC) 🦍🦍

AI Journey

My most recent corporate experience was as a Principal Data Scientist at ID.me. I hired up a small team and worked to scale the affiliate marketing business line among their 130M US subscribers. (2023-2025)

Around this time I began tinkering with AI tools like Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex, and building stuff I'd always wanted to build, but didn't have the full toolset for. The opportunity to use AI for more production development around data science and ML was clear.

I eventually dove all in to AI coding. Client work enabled me to use AI tools like Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor to learn and expand my scope into end-to-end ML, front end solutions, and a plethora of backoffice tools.

AI coding tools have definitely transformed what's possible—data scientists and product managers of all backgrounds can now drive so much more friction-free early product development, and even end-to-end development if they have the patience and desire. Exciting times!