Joe W. Hicks
Data Scientist, Statistician, Data Engineer
Anchorage, AK
About
Statistician by training with 8+ years of production data science and engineering experience. At Ookla I worked across the full stack, designing fraud detection systems, building the statistical framework behind a multi-million dollar brand licensing program, and developing novel performance metrics adopted by major ISPs worldwide, all against a 20B+ row AWS data platform. I'm drawn to problems that sit at the intersection of mathematical rigor and scalable engineering, and I work best with the autonomy to take ideas from design to delivery. Looking to bring that foundation into a senior or lead role.
Experience
- Operated across a 20B+ row AWS data platform (Redshift, Athena, S3, ClickHouse) spanning ingestion, transformation, and analytical layers.
- Built fraud detection systems exposing telecom gaming of aggregated performance rankings, including spatial-temporal analysis that identified a SIM-swapping operation targeting a single 5G tower.
- Co-developed the statistical testing framework (bootstrapped MCB for median comparisons) behind Ookla's brand licensing program; the methodology survived every regulatory challenge and generated multi-million dollars in annual awards revenue.
- Led development of VideoScore, GameScore, and Consistency: novel ISP performance metrics requiring solutions to both statistical design and the challenge of fitting compound user-level aggregations into production pipelines.
- Owned internal R and Python analytics packages; drove team migration to Python (Polars) and optimized compute-intensive pipelines using cloud Spark clusters.
- Designed power analysis and monitored metered rollout for a critical server-selection infrastructure change, providing statistical assurance before full deployment to Speedtest's global user base.
- Contributed to CAVD DataSpace, a Gates Foundation-funded ($1M+/year) platform aggregating clinical trial datasets to study vaccine schedules and immune response through meta-analysis.
- Built and maintained data cleaning and transformation pipelines for clinical trial data across R, SAS, Python, and SQL.
- Reduced Medicare overpayments through statistical sampling and experiment design.
- Delivered data visualization and statistical programming in support of healthcare operations analytics.
- Instructed graduate-level statistics courses covering R and SAS for applied data analysis.
- Developed course materials spanning statistical programming, data wrangling, and visualization.
- Conducted statistical meta-analysis of fisheries datasets in R to support ecological research.
- Collected, cleaned, and version-controlled ecological data across multiple field studies.
Education
M.S. Statistical Science
University of Idaho
Aug 2013 – May 2015
B.S. Mathematics , Minor in Statistics
University of Alaska Anchorage
Jan 2008 – Dec 2012
Projects
Anchorage Ski Wax Dashboard
Aggregates live weather data from Tempest stations near Anchorage ski trails, scrapes grooming reports, fetches NWS forecasts, and recommends ski wax by brand and tier. Runs serverlessly on AWS Lambda + EventBridge, serving a static dashboard via S3 and CloudFront, refreshed every 30 minutes.
View dashboard →