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Michael Nestel headshot

Michael Nestel

Building data products that drive revenue and scale.

AI Engineer @ Sync Wave Analytics
About Me

Data leader with a passion for turning insights into impact

I build things that matter at the intersection of data and music. Right now, I'm the founder of Sync Wave Analytics, where I'm creating the analytics infrastructure that helps labels, investors, and artists understand what their catalogs are actually worth—processing 500K+ daily streaming events across Spotify, Deezer, and Luminate.


Before going all-in on music tech, I spent five years at Spotify building the systems behind the scenes—churn prediction models serving 500M users, the data science for Wrapped campaigns, and ML features like Family Mix that shipped to millions. Earlier, I detected fraud patterns in 10M+ daily transactions at JPMorgan Chase (and earned a utility patent for privacy-preserving analytics), and cut my teeth building fantasy sports models at ESPN that powered content for 2M+ weekly users.


I studied Mathematics and Statistics at Rutgers, but what really drives me is turning messy, complex data into something that helps people make better decisions. Whether that's a $100M acquisition call or figuring out which songs deserve a second listen—I love the puzzle.

10+
Years Experience
8-Figure
Business Outcomes
0M+
Users at Scale
Music Industry
Streaming analytics, royalties, metadata integration
Data Infrastructure
BigQuery, Snowflake, dbt, real-time pipelines
Privacy-First
Patent holder, self-hosted AI, data security
Experience

From sports analytics to streaming at scale to building my own thing

S
M
S
J
E
Sync Wave Analytics logo
Dec 2024 - Present
Founder & Director of AI, Data Science, Engineering
Nashville, TN
  • Founded Lyric Nexus, a B2B music analytics platform processing 500K+ daily streaming events from Spotify, Deezer, and Luminate to deliver catalog valuations, royalty forecasting, and artist performance insights for labels and investors.
  • Architected Snowflake data warehouse with 260+ dbt models and automated Slidev reporting, reducing analyst report generation time by 80% while enabling reproducible, audience-tailored insights for stakeholders from investors to artists.
  • Developed content-based recommendation engine using audio feature embeddings and genre similarity scoring, achieving 89% precision in sync licensing matches and powering playlist curation for catalog discovery workflows.
  • Engineered full-stack platform with Next.js, TypeScript, and Neon PostgreSQL; implemented OAuth 2.0, RBAC, and row-level security enabling multi-tenant access for 15+ enterprise clients with SOC 2-ready architecture.
  • Orchestrated ETL pipelines with Prefect and Airbyte ingesting royalty data from 20+ streaming platforms, processing 250GB+ monthly with 99.5% pipeline reliability and sub-hour data freshness for real-time analytics.

MusiCapital LLC logo
Feb 2023 - Nov 2024
Director of Data Science
Nashville, TN
  • Directed data science and analytics organization of 5 for PE firm acquiring music catalogs, delivering valuation models and due diligence datasets that informed $100M+ in acquisition decisions and secured 3 investor funding rounds.
  • Migrated legacy infrastructure to GCP and built serverless ETL pipelines processing 250GB+ transaction data from 200+ royalty sources, reducing data processing costs by 60% while improving cross-team data accessibility.
  • Launched Centralized Insights Hub integrating Spotify, Deezer, and Tidal streaming data with catalog financials, enabling track-level revenue attribution and reducing monthly reporting cycles from 2 weeks to 2 days.

Spotify logo
Aug 2017 - Feb 2023
Senior Data Scientist
New York, NY
  • Engineered end-to-end churn prediction pipeline scaled to 500M users using TensorFlow and BigQuery, driving 10M user reactivations and $20M in incremental subscription revenue through targeted re-engagement campaigns.
  • Led cross-functional data science for Spotify + Hulu Bundle launch, designing propensity models and A/B testing frameworks that optimized targeting and messaging, delivering $15M lift in paid subscriptions within first quarter.
  • Managed DS and Analytics Engineering team for Wrapped 2019-2020, Spotify's most viral annual campaign; introduced matched-market testing methodology that measured 1M incremental listening hours and validated campaign ROI.
  • Drove Product Data Science for new premium tier initiative and Spotify Stations app, owning experiment design, UX research, and growth strategy that informed product roadmap decisions impacting 50M+ monthly active users.
  • Shipped two ML-powered personalization features: "Family Mix" (first cross-account algorithmic playlist) and emotion-based recommendations using image recognition, both launched to millions of users in production.

JPMorgan Chase & Co. logo
Jun 2015 - Aug 2017
Data Scientist
New York, NY
  • Engineered NLP and ML pipelines processing 10M+ daily credit card transactions for merchant matching and bot detection, achieving 92% classification accuracy and reducing fraud investigation time by 40%.
  • Granted utility patent for privacy-preserving synthetic data methods enabling secure cross-institutional analytics.

ESPN logo
Aug 2014 - Jun 2015
Statistics Analyst
Bristol, CT
  • Pioneered predictive sports analytics platform for Daily Fantasy, building ML models for lineup optimization across NBA, MLB, NHL that achieved 73% top-quartile accuracy and powered content reaching 2M+ weekly users.
  • Developed Monte Carlo simulations for MLB run expectancies with 85% accuracy; featured on ESPN broadcasts.

Projects

Personal projects showcasing full-stack development and data engineering

Applications

Full-stack web applications built for scale

Songster
Name That Tune Music Trivia
25
Tracks Per Game
5
Attempts Per Song
30s
Max Preview
100K+
Artists Available

An interactive music trivia game where players identify songs from progressively-revealed audio previews. Features a 5-attempt system with adaptive preview lengths, real-time artist search across millions of Deezer tracks, and a retro arcade aesthetic with CRT effects.

TanStack StartReactTypeScriptTailwind CSSDeezer APINitroshadcn/ui

Spicy Sports
Fantasy Sports Analytics Platform
90K+
Players Tracked
71
Fantasy Leagues
2.4K+
Matchups Analyzed
154
Managers Ranked

A comprehensive fantasy sports analytics platform with live NHL scores, Yahoo Fantasy integration, FELO rating system for manager rankings, and NHL Edge analytics for advanced player performance metrics.

Next.jsReactTypeScriptTailwind CSSNeon PostgreSQLDrizzle ORMBetter Auth

Sports Analytics Presentations
Data-Driven Research & Visualization Platform
127K+
Betting Odds Records
279K+
Shots with X,Y Coords
60M+
Statcast Pitches
6
Profitable Strategies

Comprehensive sports analytics platform built on a reusable Slidev template system with NHL betting strategy research (8-12% ROI), goalie performance analysis, and MLB sabermetrics—all powered by D3.js visualizations matching Baseball Savant quality.

SlidevVue 3D3.jsEChartsTypeScriptBigQueryExpress.js

Data Engineering

Data pipelines, warehouses, and APIs

Deezer API Proxy
Type-Safe Music API with Rate Limiting
47+
API Endpoints
55
Route Definitions
100%
Type Coverage
10
Route Modules

A lightweight serverless proxy providing type-safe access to the Deezer music platform. Features auto-generated OpenAPI documentation, sliding window rate limiting, and comprehensive coverage of search, tracks, albums, artists, playlists, and podcasts.

HonoBunTypeScriptZodOpenAPIAppwrite Functions

SWA-DBT
Analytics Engineering Data Warehouse
199
SQL Models
569+
Data Tests
4
Data Domains
279K+
Shots Analyzed

Production-grade dbt data warehouse with 569+ data quality tests, comprehensive transformation layers, and analytics-ready marts spanning sports and fantasy domains.

dbtGoogle BigQueryAirbyteGitHub ActionsSQL

YFS API
Yahoo Fantasy Sports REST API
50+
Pydantic Models
4
Sports Supported
1.2K+
Test Lines
100%
Type Coverage

High-performance FastAPI service with intelligent retry strategies, GCP Secret Manager integration, and comprehensive Pydantic validation for Yahoo Fantasy Sports data.

FastAPIPythonPydanticGoogle Cloud RunOAuth 2.0

Technical Skills

Technologies and tools I work with

Backend & Data

fastapi
hono
prisma
postgresql
redis
snowflake
duckdb
airflow
airbyte
appwrite

DevOps & Tools

gcp
docker
terraform
linux
git
github-actions
bun
postman
playwright
swagger

Languages

python
typescript
javascript
go
r
bash

Analytics & ML

tensorflow
pytorch
scikit-learn
pandas
numpy
jupyter
matplotlib
streamlit
dbt

Frontend

react
nextjs
tailwind
vuejs
svelte
d3js
visx
slidev
tanstack

Get in Touch

Open to new opportunities and collaborations

Whether you have a question, want to discuss opportunities, or just want to say hi - feel free to reach out!