Meet The Pledgers — George

Welcome to the Meet The Pledgers series in which we’ll be talking to members of our team to find out what their job involves and get a little glimpse of their day to day lives at work. We hope it will also give you a flavour of our culture.

Today we’ll be talking to George Pastakas, Data Scientist. George has been working on enhancing our measurement tool routing algorithms for rail and sea transport, to further improve the coverage and accuracy.

Why did you apply to work at Pledge? 

One of my main drivers for joining was the opportunity to build a product from scratch. This, together with the ownership and range of challenges that comes along with it, as well as the strong founding team, made me want to jump straight in.

What does an average day look like in your job?

My days primarily consist of deep work, mainly on one or two important projects, along with a few ‘business as usual’ tasks. At Pledge, meetings are kept to a minimum, but the ones we do have are very useful. We have our daily squad stand-up, where we share updates on the status of given projects, and frequent meetings to discuss OKRs and prioritise projects.

How does data science add value to Pledge?

Data science at Pledge is the powerhouse behind our emissions’ measurement and analytics tool. It requires a deep understanding of the problems we solve, how supply chains work and the way emissions are measured. The work varies and can include finding data sources and researching methodologies for emissions measurement, building data ingestion and transformation pipelines and developing algorithms for routing, clustering or outlier detection.

What are your main technical challenges? 

There’s a new challenge every week! However, what has kept me busy recently is working on the enhancements to the routing algorithms for our measurement tool. By enriching our algorithms with external data sources, we allow our users to obtain results which are as close as possible to the actual transportation paths. Besides processing substantial volumes of data and building large scale graphs and algorithms, I have also found that having a deep understanding of the data sources and the problem space, are all necessary components for a successful result.

What is Pledge Life about for you? 

Pledge Life for me is about working closely together as a team, building a best in class product, while, at the same time, giving every individual complete ownership of their area of focus. As I work on our Measurement and Analytics part of the platform, my primary driver is producing the most accurate and transparent results as possible for our customers’ carbon accounting.

What would you say to someone who might be looking to join your team? 

If you are looking for an opportunity to work on exciting and challenging problems, that will be an integral part of our product, and get an in-depth understanding of the carbon measurement and accounting space, you are in the right place! You will be given the autonomy and opportunity to shape your work and be part of a team which is highly supportive, and always there to help you overcome any challenges!

Think it could be the perfect workplace for you?

We’re hiring for a range of roles. Take a look at all our vacancies here.