When you scroll past a marketing advertisement, get a promotional email, or see your favorite influencer endorsing SoFi, how often do you think about the science that brought it to you? Data science isn't a post-launch cleanup crew at SoFi. Our Data Scientists partner with marketing from the ground up, acting as strategic copilots to build high-impact campaigns that directly power product growth.
At the helm of this integration is Samarth, who leads AI, Product Analytics, and Marketing Strategy on SoFi’s Marketing Data Science team. His work spans SoFi’s core ecosystem, including SoFi Bank, Invest, and Crypto, driving initiatives that impact more than 85% of SoFi members. A closer look into his work reveals that a modern data science role is far from one-dimensional; it requires balancing multiple distinct disciplines under a single title.
The Science Behind Impactful Marketing
Data scientists serve as the foundational architects of SoFi’s marketing strategy. By bringing continuous analytical rigor to channel allocation and audience targeting, they ensure every marketing dollar is spent with purpose.
From initial ideation, Samarth and his team pitch high-impact growth opportunities, refine target audiences, run tests, and translate market trends into compelling, fundable campaigns. Early campaign testing does more than validate an idea: it translates abstract strategy into hard metrics leadership can act on, from allocating budgets to shaping future roadmaps. Without marketing data science, campaigns are built on guesswork. With it, every decision is rooted in certainty. Great marketing does not end with data. It starts there.
Navigating Uncharted Territory
One initiative Samarth takes particular pride in is building SoFi’s foundational Crypto Marketing Data Infrastructure as a founding team member. When Crypto returned to SoFi in 2025, there was limited data on effective strategies and no established infrastructure. Samarth began with first principles, rebuilding the measurement foundation by identifying available data, meaningful signals of intent, and the conditions required to justify marketing investment. Using AI-assisted workflows, he rapidly prototyped data pipelines and tested definitions against raw data, accelerating work that would traditionally take weeks. By applying the Pareto lens, he focused resources on high-impact acquisition levers and aligned cross-functional leadership around data-backed realities.
Building a Self-Sustaining Ecosystem
For Samarth, being a data scientist extends far beyond running analysis, it means building a self-sustaining ecosystem where stakeholders can navigate data independently. Over the past year, his team pioneered a self-serve analytics framework for SoFi’s marketing organization, built on absolute technical rigor and evaluations.
At the core of this system, every query routes through a governed set of Snowflake semantic views complete with full data lineage so neither humans nor AI agents have to rely on raw table guesswork. Specialized AI agents sit atop this foundation, mirroring a data scientist’s judgment. They ask clarifying questions and execute encoded playbooks for complex calls, such as measuring promotional incrementality. The team tests these agents against benchmark data for source selection, metric accuracy, and SQL correctness, using LLMs to evaluate reasoning and human handoffs. Ongoing evaluation helps catch regressions as workflows evolve, while scope confirmation and definition logging ensure autonomy never compromises governance.
Ultimately, this framework frees data scientists to focus on high-impact growth challenges that require human ingenuity. As Samarth puts it: “The best version of this role isn’t answering every question myself. It’s building a reliable infrastructure so most questions never need to reach me in the first place.”
Samarth’s work proves that data science is far more than crunching numbers—it is the strategic engine driving SoFi forward. By pairing deep technical governance with scalable AI, his team empowers the entire organization to move faster, act smarter, and build better experiences for millions of members.
