Boston / New York
Mahdi Makki
I'm a data science student and operator. I built and scaled a two-sided marketplace to about $390,000 in volume, did expert LLM evaluation work for Handshake AI, and ship end-to-end machine learning projects on my own.
Available to start full-time immediately
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Background
About
Mahdi Makki is a Data Science and Statistics student at Northeastern University who builds things and ships them. He founded and scaled a two-sided marketplace from zero to roughly $390,000 in booking volume, designing its staffing, incentive, and quality-control systems from scratch. He has also done expert LLM evaluation work for Handshake AI and quantitative research at Weill Cornell Medicine. He holds a 3.8 GPA and is available to start full-time immediately.
Education
Northeastern University, Boston. B.S. in Data Science and Statistics. 3.8 GPA. Expected Spring 2027, coursework complete apart from two asynchronous online courses.
Tools
Python, SQL, scikit-learn, XGBoost. ParaView, 3D Slicer, ImageJ. Stripe. Marketplace and operations tooling.
Focus
Marketplace and operations design, staffing and incentive systems, data analysis, and applied machine learning.
Experience
Selected work
Founder and Operator, NorthShore Frame
Freelance real-estate photography marketplace · Essex County, MA · 2024 to 2026
- I founded and scaled a two-sided marketplace connecting freelance photographers with real-estate agents, growing it from zero to about $390,000 in booking volume, 150 photographers, and about 230 recurring agent-clients over 24 months.
- I designed the staffing, incentive, and quality-control systems from scratch: a client-rating system that auto-flagged low scores for review, and a three-strike policy that removed underperformers before they churned clients.
- I secured a vendor partnership with Canon through direct outreach, negotiating a no-cost equipment discount for participating photographers.
- I scaled monthly bookings about 6x, from $5,000 to $29,000, operating on a 15% take rate.
Science and Data Visualization Expert, Handshake AI
Contract · 2026
- I developed and evaluated domain-specific prompts to assess large language model performance on complex, computer-aided scientific-visualization tasks.
- I analyzed LLM outputs for technical accuracy, clarity, completeness, and reasoning quality, providing expert feedback that improved model performance on specialized workflows.
- I conducted independent research to support prompt development and evaluation.
Research Co-op, Weill Cornell Medicine
Neuroscience Lab · January to July 2026
- I performed high-volume quantitative image analysis of neural cells and brain organoids in ImageJ, generating structured measurement data from microscopy slices.
- I ran statistical analysis of the quantified data and built 3D reconstructions and visualizations of neural structures using ParaView and 3D Slicer.
- I'm a contributing author on a manuscript currently in preparation.
Leadership and creative work
Beyond the lab
Student Government, Northeastern University
Elected Student Body Vice President · 2025 to present
- I was elected Student Body Vice President in 2025 and currently sit on the Student Council.
- I helped plan and budget a spring 2026 campus event, booking producer and DJ Mustard, known for producing Kendrick Lamar's "Not Like Us," to headline the Oakland campus.
- I regularly present proposals and initiatives to the student body.
Reddit Virality Classifier
Personal project · Python, scikit-learn, XGBoost, sentence-transformers, BERTopic, NetworkX, SHAP · 2026
- I built an end-to-end ML pipeline predicting whether a post reaches top-1% engagement using only first-10-minute signals, reaching 0.22 average precision, about 22 times the no-skill baseline.
- I engineered NLP and graph features, including sentence-transformer title embeddings, topic modeling, and comment-tree reply graphs to surface high-centrality accounts.
- I deployed an interactive dashboard that turns a title and post time into a virality probability with SHAP explanations.
Communication
Languages
I speak three languages natively and work in a fourth, which shapes much of the multilingual review work I do.