Jekaterina Kokatjuhha is a data generalist. As a freelancer, she helps companies bridge the gap between business and data by building actionable analytics and coaching their teams, drawing on broad experience across startups, entrepreneurship, and scale-ups.

Her career started in science: Jekaterina earned Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in bioinformatics and worked at research institutes across Europe, including the University of Manchester, Charité in Berlin, and the Center for Genomic Regulation in Barcelona. Realizing that research was not what motivated her most, she joined a startup as its first data hire, where she was hired as a data analyst and ended up doing a lot of data engineering.

She then moved to Zalando, where she built real-time machine learning systems for fraud prediction and payment scoring in Zalando Payments, the algorithms behind how customers pay on the platform. Jekaterina later became head of analytics at Gitti, a beauty brand, and tried her hand at starting her own fintech business with Entrepreneur First. She shared this journey on the DataTalksClub podcast in an episode on the path of a data generalist, from bioinformatics to freelancing.