Career Stories: A Chat with Odie Edo-Osagie, Lead Data Scientist

Welcome to Careers Stories! Follow this series, where we’ll hear from Depop folks at various stages of their career journey, as we shine a light on how they reached their version of success – and the people that helped them along the way. This week, we're chatting with Odie Edo-Osagie, one of Depop’s Lead Data Scientists.

Odie’s Early Career (...and how he got started)

My first tech job was a summer internship at a software startup founded out of Cambridge University. My job for the summer was to make it possible to remotely view and control an iPhone from an android phone, to essentially use a remote iPhone on your android device. I remember being very worried that I wasn’t going to be able to solve it as it seemed too big a problem for an intern and I wasn’t even sure how possible it was to begin with. To solve it, I had to counterintuitively do something that isn’t usually seen as vital to the programming process. I had to drill down to the basics of how both operating systems worked, and simple networking protocols to send the screen feed and screen actions between devices.

The experience taught me that pretty much any problem is solvable if you can break it down to the basics, understand those, and gradually work your way up from there. It sounds really basic but it gives me a lot of peace of mind.

Odie’s Childhood Ambitions (...and how he began programming)

As a teenager, I didn’t really have any strong ideas of what I wanted to do. When I was a kid going on MSN and Miniclip at my friends’ houses I’d always wondered how they worked but I wanted to be a musician so didn’t think too much of it. My mum was happy for me to pursue music as a career as long as I also went to university, so I just had to pick any course to study. I picked computer science on a whim because I thought it’d be cool to learn how all those programs I used worked. But from my first week studying it, I was obsessed. I remember learning simple HTML and going straight home to build the most basic Childish Gambino mixtape website (although in hindsight I don’t know how legal that was!) and being so wowed that that was something I could just do.

Fundamentally, I realised you could pretty much make anything with programming and loved the huge potential for creativity - just as much, if not more so than with music. Gradually, it became that I was doing my degree and music on the side, until I was fully locked into my degree/career and only did music as a hobby.

Odie’s A-ha Moment (...and when his thinking shifted)

Even though I now work in machine learning and AI, I started out as a Software Engineer, specialising in iOS development. Becoming an iOS Engineer made sense for me. At university, I had an iPhone and would always make apps to solve random things for myself, so I did a lot of iOS development. At the end of my undergraduate degree, I took a module on machine learning and became super fascinated by the concept. The idea that instead of procedurally telling a computer how to solve a problem you have, you could just give it a bunch of data and have it figure out the solution?! It was a major shift in thinking for me at the time and I was so intrigued that I decided to do a PhD on the subject. During my PhD, I still worked as an iOS developer but I was also figuring out how to work machine learning into apps as I thought it would be key to get it into everyday use and apps could be a big avenue for that.

Odie’s Side Project (...and how he’s making art more accessible)

I’m a big believer in side projects. I sometimes have things I’m curious about in a personal context and usually find side projects to be a good way to explore and develop that. I think personal development really helps career development.

My current side project is a platform called BRUSHWRK aimed at making art more accessible, both on the buyer and artist side. I’m learning a whole lot from it. However, It can get difficult to maintain a side project when working full-time, so I have to remind myself that things don’t need to move at light-speed and I dictate the pace. It could be an hour a month to an hour every night. There’s no too small or too big, just whatever works.

Odie’s Closing Thoughts on Depop (...and how we can make a difference)

Depop is a company with a bunch of different arms in multiple senses. There are multiple arms in terms of business functions - Customer Experience, Trust and Safety, Inventory, Search and Discovery. There are also multiple arms in the sense that users can be buyers or sellers. I think having diverse career experience helps in thinking about richer solutions to problems. For example, an Engineer in search who also has experience in Customer Experience knows what users usually complain about. So when discussions are happening about making that new feature that might make some users unhappy, they can use their user insights to save the team the time and trouble of putting the feature out and having to go back and tweak it. I think exposing Depop employees to other parts of the business or encouraging internal moves and hires where possible could be a good way to promote more of this!