Ya Xu leads the LinkedIn data science practice, consisting of hundreds of researchers distributed across the USA (Sunnyvale, Mountain View, San Francisco, New York), India and Dublin. The team touches every aspect of the organization, helping to inform decisions about new product features, business investments, surfacing economic insights for policy makers, and much more. In this interview, Sam and Ya explore her career transition from a platform-oriented role to one focused on data science products, the horizontal tools and capabilities her team maintains, and some of the ways her team is innovating in areas like experimentation, privacy and fairness.
