Bennet Voorhees

Location: Seattle, WA 98199
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/bennetvoorheesGitHub: github.com/bvoorhees

People Analytics and AI leader specializing in context engineering—architecting and managing the context layers that make enterprise AI accurate, governed, and grounded in organizational truth. More than a decade across advanced analytics, economics, machine learning, statistical modeling, and data visualization, including seven years leading analytics and science teams at Amazon, Expedia, and Merck. Specialize in enriching fragmented HR and workforce data into AI-ready context—structuring knowledge, retrieval, and governance so AI systems link people data directly to business outcomes such as retention, performance, and profitability. Architect end-to-end context pipelines spanning data ingestion, enrichment, vector and knowledge-graph retrieval, and full-stack delivery, with a track record of standing up first-of-their-kind HR science teams and production machine learning platforms. Translate complex technical work into boardroom-ready insight for CHROs and executive leadership, and communicate effectively across technical and non-technical audiences in global, cross-cultural organizations. Technical proficiency in AWS (Bedrock, Q Business, CDK, Glue, S3, Athena, SageMaker, Redshift, QuickSight), vector databases, RAG architectures, Python, R, Spark (via R and Python APIs), React/TypeScript with D3, Tableau, Spotfire, Power BI, Trino, PostgreSQL, and MS Office.

Areas of Expertise

Career Experience

Ikona Analytics, Seattle, WA (July 2025 – Present)

Co-Founder & Chief Technology Officer

New York University School of Professional Studies (NYU SPS), New York, NY (2019 – 2021; 2026 – Present)

Adjunct Instruction Faculty, Certificate in People Analytics

Expedia Group, Seattle, WA (November 2023 – July 2025)

Director, Machine Learning Science and Engineering, People Team

Amazon, Seattle, WA (February 2022 – October 2023)

Lead, Senior Data Scientist

Merck (MSD), New York, NY (November 2019 – February 2022)

Head of HR Data Science

Additional Work Experience

Education