Katie Bauer is the Head of Data at GlossGenius, a leading software platform for beauty professionals in the US salon and studio space, where she builds and leads the company’s data organization. Her career began in linguistics before an interest in language and computation pulled her into analytics, a path she often recounts when mentoring people considering a switch into data.

Katie has held senior data leadership roles at some of the most recognized consumer technology companies. At Twitter, she led the infrastructure data science and analytics organization; at Reddit, she ran the consumer data science team. Earlier in her career she worked as an analyst and machine learning engineer in adtech and natural language search, hands-on experience that continues to shape how she evaluates analytics work today.

Her thinking on what good analytics looks like, including maintainability, documentation, and peer review, has made her a valued voice on data careers and team building. She writes and speaks about hiring data scientists, choosing between IC and management paths, mentoring junior team members through project-based learning, and fostering data-driven cultures, with practical advice drawn from years of leading data teams in B2B SaaS and consumer technology.