I'm Dina — a data scientist turned founder, originally from Serbia 🇷🇸, who somehow ended up in San Francisco 🇺🇸 via Ottawa and Toronto 🇨🇦.

I studied Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science at the University of Belgrade, then moved to Canada for my M.Sc. in Mathematics & Statistics with a Data Science specialization at the University of Ottawa, where I also taught Calculus and Probability & Statistics to engineering students and published research in mathematical statistics.

From there I went into industry — first at Hubdoc (a Toronto startup automating financial document collection, later acquired by Xero), then at Yelp working on ML and A/B testing for multi-location advertising, and most recently at Square as Data Science Lead for the Customer Engagement suite. At Square I owned DS strategy for a $1B+ product portfolio, led ML-driven pricing initiatives, built ETL pipelines, and acted as interim PM for Gift Cards.

In 2026 I left the IC track to build something of my own. I'm writing about the process here.

This blog covers applied machine learning, data science in production, and what the leap from data scientist to founder actually looks like from the inside.