KRKyara Rafferty
ANALYTICS ENGINEER · ENTERTAINMENT & MUSIC

Making complex data
useful.

I’m a hands-on analytics engineer and director building data products, models, and pipelines for the entertainment and music industry.

Director, Analytics Engineer
BMG Rights Management

Selected work

01 — 02 / ACADEMIC PROJECTS
01
DATA PRODUCTS / INTERACTIVE VISUALIZATION

From ingredients
to possibilities.

An ingredient recommendation system that brings together substitution knowledge, machine learning, and an interactive graph.

PythonWord2VecJavaScript / D3JSON
Explore the project ↓
INGREDIENT RECOMMENDER SYSTEM
Curated substitutions
Word2Vec recommendations
Price + category + allergen data
Integrated ingredient data
Interactive recommendation graph
FROM SOURCE DATA TO A USABLE PRODUCT
PROJECT WALKTHROUGH

See the system in action.

A demo of the Ingredient Recommender System, presented by me.

Watch on YouTube ↗

The challenge

Ingredient substitutes depend on context. The team built a prototype that lets users explore alternatives and adjust recommendations using cost and dietary filters.

My contribution

I developed Python integration and graph-generation components, enriched recommendations with metadata, improved the interactive visualization, and resolved scoring and missing-data issues.

The result

A connected workflow from source data to graph-ready JSON and a browsable interface. My work spans the data layer, presentation, debugging, and integration with teammates’ contributions.

Project evidence & team context +

Georgia Tech · CSE 6242, Data & Visual Analytics · Team project, 2025. Contributions described here are supported by the project’s Git history. The allergen filters are research-prototype functionality, not a validated safety assessment.

Original team poster showing the ingredient recommendation interface, data sources, methodology, and evaluation

Original team poster. Open the image to inspect the full project.

02
ENTERTAINMENT ANALYTICS / STATISTICAL LEARNING

What comes
after the original?

Exploring sequel performance through franchise data, feature engineering, and comparative statistical modeling.

PythonRTMDBFeature engineering
Explore the project ↓
PREDICTING SEQUEL PERFORMANCE
THE ORIGINAL01THE NEXT CHAPTER02
Franchise historyCast continuityEconomic context
A DATASET BUILT AROUND A BUSINESS QUESTION

The question

Can characteristics of a film and its franchise help explain whether a sequel earns more than the original—and the magnitude of that difference?

My contribution

As the primary contributor to a five-person team project, I worked across data collection, preparation, feature engineering, modeling, and communication of the analysis.

What it demonstrates

Combining film and economic data, addressing missing financial records, and connecting model comparisons to business questions. This is an academic exploration, not a production forecasting system.

Approach & limitations +

Georgia Tech · ISYE 7406, Data Mining & Statistical Learning · Team project, 2026.

The workflow brings together TMDB film data and economic indicators, creates franchise and cast-overlap features, and compares classification and regression approaches. The central engineering challenge is making inconsistent source data usable for analysis.

Interpretation requires care around missing revenue, franchise relationships across evaluation splits, and the historical availability of audience metrics. Model scores are omitted here pending reconciliation of the report’s evaluation summaries.

EXPERIENCE

Industry context.
Engineering depth.

More than a decade in entertainment and music, with a career spanning licensing, analytics, and analytics engineering leadership.

2025 — PRESENT

Director, Analytics Engineer

BMG Rights Management

Hands-on product building and individual-contributor engineering alongside leadership: developing data products, models, pipelines, and tools while shaping engineering standards, reviewing code, and mentoring colleagues.

2021 — 2025

Senior Analytics Engineer

BMG Rights Management

dbt data models, Airflow pipelines, Looker business logic, and a Python / Streamlit tool for royalty reconciliation.

2019 — 2021 / 2014 — 2019

Music licensing & operations

BMG · Warner Music Group

Process improvement, reporting, automation, team training, and licensing operations.

ABOUT ME

A builder, a collaborator,
and an educator.

My career connects music and entertainment operations with hands-on analytics engineering. That background shapes how I approach a problem: understand the people and the business, then build the data products that help them move forward.

At BMG, I continue to do substantial individual-contributor work as a director. Alongside building products, I help teams strengthen their engineering practices and share what they learn.

EDUCATION

M.S. in Analytics

Georgia Institute of Technology

CURRENT TEACHING ROLE

Instructional Associate

Business Data Preparation and Visualization
Georgia Institute of Technology

Tools I work with

SQL / Python / dbt / Airflow / BigQuery / LookML / Git / Tableau