Hello, I'm
Brianna Ta
Software Engineer & Data Scientist building meaningful products at the intersection of engineering and ML. Currently at IXL Learning, previously at Cisco.
01 · About
Who I am
I'm a software engineer and data scientist passionate about building products that are both technically rigorous and deeply human. I hold an MS in Data Science from Columbia University and a BS in Computer Science from UNC Chapel Hill.
I love working at the intersection of software engineering and machine learning — whether that's building accessible frontend components at scale, designing ML pipelines, or crafting interactive data visualizations.
From presenting at Cisco Live to 20,000+ attendees to shipping accessibility features for millions of students, I thrive in environments where my work has real impact.
4+
Years of industry experience across 4 companies
12+
Projects in ML, data viz & full-stack
2
Degrees — MS Data Science & BS CS
02 · Experience
Where I've worked
Jul 2025 — Present
Software Engineer
IXL Learning
- Optimized slope field rendering performance by 80–90%, reducing load time from 25–30 seconds to ~3 seconds through deep investigation of the parser and shape render models
- Led the color contrast accessibility initiative, architecting the CSS/JS infrastructure for a sitewide increased contrast toggle and implementing color changes across 10+ components (dropdowns, number lines, area models, draggable tiles, fill-ins)
- Developed and shipped student-facing interactive math and science components in React and Java, including a new segmented bar graph component built from scratch with audio button accessibility support
- Resolved a P1 grading bug in streak-scoring skills and identified an unreviewed merge request before it reached production, preventing a P0 release incident
- Wrote Python and Node.js scripts to batch-resize and rename 1,300+ SVGs, coordinating with stakeholders on output format and documenting the workflow for future use
May 2022 — Jun 2025
Software Engineering Intern
Cisco
- Adopted Webex bots to send alert notifications for lab conditions, reducing equipment damage by 20%
- Automated security report generation using Python for Cisco CyberVision
- Developed JavaScript analytics dashboard monitoring facilities across 15 data centers including the US Navy
- Managed and mentored the Cisco High 2022 Program with 140+ externs across 9 nationwide sites
- Presented IoT Application Servers at Cisco Live to 20,000+ attendees
Dec 2021 — May 2022
Software Engineering Intern
TTek
- Engineered educational website in React to record student learning achievements and deliver learning reports
- Integrated dynamic backend using Google Firebase
Mar 2021 — Jul 2021
Software Engineering Intern
Kenari Adaptive Learning
- Constructed a gamified Angular website for elementary students covering grammar, reading comprehension, vocabulary, and spelling
- Elevated UI/UX efficiency by implementing Angular components with Google Firebase backend
03 · Projects
Things I've built
Gen AI Advisor — TD Bank
Columbia DSI capstone with TD Bank. Designed reranking, hybrid search, and abstention mechanisms for a GPT-4o-powered chatbot using RAG pipelines. Enhanced reliability through semantic similarity scoring and intelligent fallback logic.
Forecasting Online Retail Sales
Predicted daily unit sales for a UK-based retailer using Prophet, LSTM, DeepAR, and Temporal Fusion Transformer. Applied K-Means, DBSCAN, and HDBSCAN for product segmentation, and integrated Gemini 2.5 LLM embeddings for semantic clustering.
Electricity Consumption Forecasting
Forecasted daily electricity usage for 264 Portuguese clients using LSTM RNN, SARIMAX, Prophet, and Holt-Winters. Applied K-Medoids consensus clustering to manage customer heterogeneity — best MAPE of 4.9% with LSTM.
Video Game Toxicity Classifier
Text classification pipeline detecting toxicity across Twitter, Twitch, and Discord gaming communities. Compared GPT-2 and BERT-base under no tuning, full fine-tuning, and LoRA strategies using Hugging Face Transformers.
CitiBike Usage Analysis & Forecasting
Analyzed NYC bike-sharing patterns using linear/logistic regression, random forest, and a PyTorch neural network. Applied K-Means for user segmentation and ARIMA/SARIMA to model ride volume trends.
UNC CS Experience Labs (CSXL)
Open-source platform for the UNC Computer Science Experience Labs, supporting student community, office hours, reservations, and CS organization management. A full-stack production app used by UNC's CS department.
IoT Application Server — Cisco
LoRaWAN sensor-based solutions for tracking US Navy flightline assets and monitoring labs at Cisco's Herndon office. Presented at Cisco Live to 20,000+ attendees and featured on Cisco Code Exchange.
Feather 🏆 Pearl Hacks 2024
Mobile app where users photograph nearby birds and share them to a global feed for nature lovers. Won Most Creative Use of Redis Cloud at Pearl Hacks 2024.
Kiwi 🏆 Pearl Hacks 2023
Automated budget tracker that processes physical and digital receipts and generates personalized budgeting calculations based on income and savings goals. Won Best Use of Twilio at Pearl Hacks 2023.
OTIS 🥈 Webex Global Hackathon
MERN stack web app tracking building occupancy using Computer Vision and ML, deployed on Heroku with AWS. Won 2nd place out of 100+ international teams at the Global Cisco Webex Hackathon.
04 · Education
Where I studied
MS in Data Science
Columbia University · New York, NY
Courses: Deep Learning, Machine Learning, Exploratory Data Analysis and Visualization, Computer Systems, Forecasting
May 2025
BS in Computer Science · Minor in Data Science
UNC Chapel Hill · Chapel Hill, NC
May 2024
Involvement
Lead Director & Director of DevelopmentHackNC
President, VP & Tech LeadCS + Social Good
AmbassadorComputer Science Experience Lab
Outreach CommitteeGirls Who Code
05 · Skills
What I work with
Certifications
Programming Languages
AI / ML
Web & Frameworks
Data & Databases
Cloud & DevOps