Her Story
About Daria
Daria Kolobova is a Senior Data Analyst based in Princeton, New Jersey. With nine years of experience in the field, she began her career as a junior analyst and has progressed to her current senior role at Constructor, where she contributes to the search quality team. Her work centers on relevance for site search and product discovery in e-commerce. Daria holds both bachelor’s and master’s degrees in applied physics. Throughout her career, she has worked across marketing, product, and growth analytics before transitioning into search quality and relevance, where she now works with sophisticated machine-learning models and large language models. She is an active participant in the analytical community in Philadelphia and Princeton community meetups. Outside of work, Daria volunteers at an animal shelter and co-founded and hosts an English-speaking club in the Yandex family community. She attributes her success to the exceptional people she has worked with and believes that caring about your colleagues and the people who use your products is a powerful foundation for professional growth. Her advice is to protect work-life balance, approach anxiety with patience and honesty, and remember that meaningful success comes not only from what we achieve, but from how we support the people around us.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Daria
01What do you attribute your success to?
I attribute much of my success to the many great people I have worked with throughout my career. Each of them shaped me in a different way and added an important piece to the puzzle of who I am today, so it is difficult to point to any single person or moment.
02What’s the best career advice you’ve ever received?
The best career advice I’ve received is that I am already good enough. I do not need to prove myself constantly, I need to trust my abilities, stay composed and trust my judgment.
03What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
It is a crazy market right now, but I still believe it is possible to start and progress a career. Care about what you do, and care about the people you do it with. Skills matter, but genuine interest, commitment, and the right people around you will carry you much further.
04What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
The pace of work is getting crazy, especially with LLMs and the amount of information we deal with every day. The challenge is to keep up without losing your work-life balance or yourself. It is important to stay curious, use new tools wisely, and be honest about what kind of work and life you want.
05What values are most important to you in your work and personal life?
To be a person who cares. I believe that empathy, the desire to understand one another, and the ability to find common ground can create wonderful things—things that people are proud of and genuinely enjoy. This matters to me in what we build for our users, how we work as a team, and everything I do in my personal life.
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