Experience
Seven years across South Pole, Publicis Groupe and WPP.
- Jul 2026 to present
Associate Director, Data & Insights
South Pole · London / Remote
Lead a team of six and own the data platform, marts and reporting stack for 501 people. Built Orca, the company's enterprise AI assistant, and the governed platform under it: a semantic layer on OpenMetadata, self-hosted Dagster, automated access governance and FinOps across 195 GCP projects. Wrote the Data Foundation Plan adopted by ExCo, ~295k EUR a year of direct savings.
- Own the company data strategy: defined, costed and secured ExCo endorsement for the Data Foundation Plan, a roadmap to 2028 across seven workstreams (semantic layer, orchestration, visualisation, AI platform, data quality at scale, access governance, SLAs). Lead a team of six serving 501 employees.
- Built Orca, South Pole's enterprise AI assistant: deep research grounded in company data, South Pole-format documents, decks and sales proposals, position-aware access. Within three weeks of the 2.0 release, 131 employees, over a quarter of the company, were querying governed data through it; 560,000+ requests served at 99.99% success.
- Designed Orca Semantics, a governed semantic layer on self-hosted OpenMetadata: version-controlled definitions, named domain owners, streamed into Orca as context and underpinning the visualisation layer.
- Replaced dbt Cloud with self-hosted Dagster on GKE in three weeks, validated by shadow runs across 1,800+ models matching production output, avoiding a three-year renewal at ~27k EUR a year (81k EUR over the term). Deploys run without a human step.
- Retiring Power BI (98 reports, 410 users) for Orca Visuals, removing ~200k EUR a year in licences; ~295k EUR a year of direct savings across the ecosystem plan.
- Took platform incidents from one every two days to roughly one a month with proactive alerting and self-healing pipelines.
- Automated data access governance: a self-service portal opens IAM grant pull requests through a GitHub App, returning 40+ hours a month to the team.
- FinOps across 195 GCP projects: anomaly dashboard with P99 alerting caught a 6x BigQuery spend spike in March 2026 and returned it to baseline; marts query spend down 46% year on year.
- Codified five rotating admin roles (support, sprint, access, reliability, tech debt) as runbooks and AI-assisted skills; set the team's AI harness standards and moved delivery to product-based thinking.
- Mar 2024 to Jul 2026
Lead Specialist, Data Engineering
South Pole · London / Remote
Owned the climate-finance data estate. Migrated 18k+ cloud resources from Pulumi to modular Terraform, shipped governed FastAPI/FastMCP services that let LLM/RAG workloads reach sensitive carbon-credit data without breaking access controls, and launched Orca 1.0 to the company in June 2026.
- Migrated 18,000+ cloud resources from Pulumi to modular Terraform; standardised IAM, networking and policy-as-code so five business units share one platform.
- Shipped governed FastAPI/FastMCP services on Cloud Run that let LLM and RAG workloads reach sensitive carbon-credit transaction data under enforced access controls, with eval suites guarding accuracy.
- Built and launched Orca 1.0 to the company in June 2026, the foundation of the enterprise AI assistant now used across South Pole.
- Cut data marts BigQuery query spend 46% year on year through FinOps and DataOps practice; the platform ran governed, observable and within budget.
- Ran the data estate (95 datasets, 8,000+ tables, 21 TB) with strict standards, real backups, regular drills and full observability.
- Jul 2023 to Mar 2024
Senior Data Engineer II
Publicis Groupe, Digitas UK · London
Cut flagship GCP + Airflow workloads from four hours to two. Built GitHub Actions CI/CD that replaced manual deployments.
- Cut flagship GCP + Airflow workloads from four hours to two.
- Built GitHub Actions CI/CD that replaced manual deployments across client pipelines.
- Oct 2022 to Jul 2023
Senior Data Engineer I
Publicis Groupe, Digitas UK · London
Normalised cross-channel marketing data for clients including Samsung and Formula 1, on tight campaign deadlines.
- Normalised cross-channel marketing data for clients including Samsung and Formula 1, on tight campaign deadlines.
- Aug 2021 to Sep 2022
Senior Associate, Data Analytics Engineering
Publicis Groupe, Digitas Mumbai · Mumbai
Cut a client's monthly cloud spend by 98% by rationalising the compute layer of the pipelines. Scaled Facebook Ads ingestion from 3 to 100+ weekly loads, taking deployment from hours to minutes. Led a team of 3 on automated pipelines and dashboards for near real-time campaign analytics.
- Cut a client's monthly cloud spend by 98% by rationalising the compute layer of the pipelines.
- Scaled Facebook Ads ingestion from 3 to 100+ weekly loads, taking deployment from hours to minutes.
- Led a team of 3 on automated pipelines and dashboards for near real-time campaign analytics.
- Jun 2021 to Oct 2021
Manager, Data and Technology
WPP, GroupM · Mindshare · Mumbai
Built a GCP data lake for Disney+ Hotstar that dropped reporting cycles from days to hours. Unified app, ad, and CRM data so content decisions could be made in near real-time.
- Built a GCP data lake for Disney+ Hotstar that dropped reporting cycles from days to hours, unifying app, ad and CRM data for near real-time content decisions.
- Dec 2020 to Jun 2021
Senior Associate, Data Science
Publicis Groupe, Digitas Mumbai · Mumbai
Built and deployed multilingual sentiment analysis pipelines, doubling labelled-data coverage for planners. Created Power BI dashboards that spread across teams and cut manual update time by half.
- Built and deployed multilingual sentiment analysis pipelines, doubling labelled-data coverage for planners.
- Created Power BI dashboards that spread across teams and cut manual update time by half.
- Jul 2019 to Dec 2020
Associate, Data Science
Publicis Groupe, Digitas Mumbai · Mumbai
Automated data collection and transformation workflows, turning months of manual effort into minutes.
- Automated data collection and transformation workflows, turning months of manual effort into minutes.
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