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$ whoami

Know what actually
drives your growth

I'm Shafquat Arefeen — I build attribution pipelines and funnel data models for growth teams. From raw ingestion to marketing attribution across SEO, AI engines (AEO), and paid — so you know exactly which channels drive revenue. 10+ years of data engineering across government and Big Tech.

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Shafquat Arefeen

About Me

Husband. Father. Data Scientist. Real Estate Agent*. Sometimes a pickleball athlete.
*Right At Home Realty

Data makes the world go round

I've worked across finance, government, real estate, universities, and now growth marketing at a global tech company. Every industry has its own data needs and infrastructure, but ultimately data is data — the tools to ETL and analyze are interchangeable once you know them deeply.

What I do today

Data Lead & Growth Data Engineer with 10+ years across government and Big Tech: end-to-end attribution pipelines, tracking infrastructure, and multi-touch marketing funnels. I model web traffic from referrer headers, UTM parameters, and user-agents into unified growth data models at scale with dbt, Airflow, and BigQuery.

Consulting

My experience lets me take on interesting consulting projects when I have time to spare. I provide a free first consultation to understand your data needs and show how I can help. When I'm not digging into data, I'll be with my family — usually in a unique part of the world.

In The Media

Highlights from when my work was featured in major publications.

Translating Terms with LLMs (GPT and Vertex AI)

Using GPT via the OpenAI API and Vertex AI through BigQuery's ML.GENERATE_TEXT function to translate terminology at scale.

Towards Data Science

Video Gaming The System

Discussing the real-life effects of hyperinflation in the economy of a video game.

NPR Planet Money

Pulling Stock Data and Creating an Efficient Frontier in Excel

Portfolio optimization: annualized expected return for a given risk tolerance, with asset-allocation weightings to guide investment strategy.

Towards Data Science

Canadian home sales tumble to 7-year low

A numbers breakdown of Toronto's foreign-buyer levy and its effect on listings and prices, provided to national news.

Global News

Toronto housing data project

My ad-free visualization of trends in Toronto's housing market drew 13,000 visitors in its first month — and a cease & desist from the real estate board.

Metro News · The Greater Fool

Engineering lessons to the streets

Audible textured transit maps using Braille and relief features to guide riders with low vision through station layouts.

Toronto Star

Attribution, Visualized

How I think about growth measurement in the LLM era: people prompt AI engines, the AI mentions (or doesn't mention) your brand in its response, and those mentions drive conversions. Hover the bubbles — each one is a specific prompt keyword, sized by prompt volume. (Illustrative data for a fictional brand.) Want the how-to? Read my playbook for detecting and attributing AI-engine traffic.

Services

Whether you have a one-off question or need a data platform from scratch.

Growth & Attribution

Multi-touch attribution, SEO/AEO/SEM measurement, conversion funnel modeling from first touch to customer — including AI-engine (LLM) traffic your analytics is currently filing under “Direct.”

Pipelines & Ingestion

Full ETL/ELT pipelines built from scratch or rescued from sprawl — Spark, dbt, Airflow, BigQuery, AWS. Ingestion to insight, tested and documented.

Teaching & Presentations

As a university lecturer in data visualization with years of public speaking experience, I deliver meaningful insight through data — for classrooms or boardrooms.

Real Estate

Data is deeply coveted in the real estate market. As an agent with Right At Home Realty, let me help you make your housing dreams a reality — with data on your side.

Education

Master of Management Analytics

Queen's University

B.A.Sc. Engineering Science

University of Toronto

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