{
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  "basics": {
    "name": "Saahil Mehta",
    "label": "Associate Director, Data & Insights",
    "email": "self@saahil.co.uk",
    "url": "https://saahil.co.uk",
    "summary": "Associate Director leading a six-person data and insights team at South Pole, a 501-person climate solutions company. Built Orca, the company's enterprise AI assistant, and the governed platform underneath it: a semantic layer on OpenMetadata, self-hosted Dagster orchestration, automated access governance and FinOps across 195 GCP projects. Author of the data strategy adopted by ExCo, with ~295k EUR a year of direct savings in its plan. Hands-on across GCP, BigQuery, Terraform, dbt, Dagster, FastAPI and LLM systems.",
    "location": {
      "city": "London",
      "countryCode": "GB"
    },
    "profiles": [
      {
        "network": "GitHub",
        "username": "saahil-mehta",
        "url": "https://github.com/saahil-mehta"
      },
      {
        "network": "LinkedIn",
        "username": "saahil-mehta",
        "url": "https://www.linkedin.com/in/saahil-mehta"
      }
    ]
  },
  "work": [
    {
      "name": "South Pole",
      "position": "Associate Director, Data & Insights",
      "location": "London / Remote",
      "startDate": "2026-07-01",
      "summary": "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.",
      "highlights": [
        "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."
      ]
    },
    {
      "name": "South Pole",
      "position": "Lead Specialist, Data Engineering",
      "location": "London / Remote",
      "startDate": "2024-03-01",
      "endDate": "2026-07-01",
      "summary": "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.",
      "highlights": [
        "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."
      ]
    },
    {
      "name": "Publicis Groupe, Digitas UK",
      "position": "Senior Data Engineer II",
      "location": "London",
      "startDate": "2023-07-01",
      "endDate": "2024-03-01",
      "summary": "Cut flagship GCP + Airflow workloads from four hours to two. Built GitHub Actions CI/CD that replaced manual deployments.",
      "highlights": [
        "Cut flagship GCP + Airflow workloads from four hours to two.",
        "Built GitHub Actions CI/CD that replaced manual deployments across client pipelines."
      ]
    },
    {
      "name": "Publicis Groupe, Digitas UK",
      "position": "Senior Data Engineer I",
      "location": "London",
      "startDate": "2022-10-01",
      "endDate": "2023-07-01",
      "summary": "Normalised cross-channel marketing data for clients including Samsung and Formula 1, on tight campaign deadlines.",
      "highlights": [
        "Normalised cross-channel marketing data for clients including Samsung and Formula 1, on tight campaign deadlines."
      ]
    },
    {
      "name": "Publicis Groupe, Digitas Mumbai",
      "position": "Senior Associate, Data Analytics Engineering",
      "location": "Mumbai",
      "startDate": "2021-08-01",
      "endDate": "2022-09-01",
      "summary": "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.",
      "highlights": [
        "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."
      ]
    },
    {
      "name": "WPP, GroupM · Mindshare",
      "position": "Manager, Data and Technology",
      "location": "Mumbai",
      "startDate": "2021-06-01",
      "endDate": "2021-10-01",
      "summary": "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.",
      "highlights": [
        "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."
      ]
    },
    {
      "name": "Publicis Groupe, Digitas Mumbai",
      "position": "Senior Associate, Data Science",
      "location": "Mumbai",
      "startDate": "2020-12-01",
      "endDate": "2021-06-01",
      "summary": "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.",
      "highlights": [
        "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."
      ]
    },
    {
      "name": "Publicis Groupe, Digitas Mumbai",
      "position": "Associate, Data Science",
      "location": "Mumbai",
      "startDate": "2019-07-01",
      "endDate": "2020-12-01",
      "summary": "Automated data collection and transformation workflows, turning months of manual effort into minutes.",
      "highlights": [
        "Automated data collection and transformation workflows, turning months of manual effort into minutes."
      ]
    }
  ],
  "volunteer": [
    {
      "organization": "Museum of English Rural Life",
      "position": "Volunteer",
      "summary": "Volunteer, Museum of English Rural Life (Jun 2025 to present): built an OCR + two-stage LLM pipeline that turned nine years of handwritten visitor cards into searchable data and a leadership report."
    },
    {
      "organization": "Data Science Festival",
      "position": "Mentor",
      "url": "https://datasciencefestival.com",
      "summary": "Mentor, Data Science Festival (Mar 2026 to present): Spring 2026 cohort of early-career professionals moving into data and AI roles."
    },
    {
      "organization": "Google",
      "position": "Invite-only Programme",
      "summary": "Google Developer Specialist (2026): selected for Google's invite-only Developer Programme; technical content on Medium."
    }
  ],
  "education": [
    {
      "institution": "University of Strathclyde (Business School)",
      "studyType": "Master of Science in Data Analytics",
      "score": "First-Class Honours / Distinction",
      "startDate": "2022-09-01",
      "endDate": "2023-09-01"
    },
    {
      "institution": "University of Mumbai (Shah & Anchor Kutchhi Engineering College)",
      "studyType": "Bachelor of Computer Engineering",
      "score": "3.25 GPA"
    },
    {
      "institution": "Shri Bhagubhai Mafatlal Polytechnic (SBMP)",
      "studyType": "Three-year Diploma in Computer Engineering",
      "score": "7.77 / 10"
    }
  ],
  "skills": [
    {
      "name": "Platform",
      "keywords": [
        "GCP",
        "BigQuery",
        "Terraform",
        "Dagster",
        "dbt",
        "Airflow",
        "Cloud Run",
        "GKE",
        "Cloud SQL",
        "GitHub Actions",
        "Python",
        "SQL",
        "TypeScript"
      ]
    },
    {
      "name": "AI",
      "keywords": [
        "LLM applications",
        "RAG",
        "MCP",
        "Agents",
        "Evals",
        "Vertex AI",
        "Gemini",
        "Claude",
        "FastAPI",
        "FastMCP"
      ]
    },
    {
      "name": "Governance",
      "keywords": [
        "OpenMetadata",
        "IAM",
        "Policy tags and PII masking",
        "Data quality",
        "FinOps",
        "Access governance"
      ]
    },
    {
      "name": "Leadership",
      "keywords": [
        "Team leadership",
        "Data strategy",
        "ExCo communication",
        "Product thinking",
        "Mentoring",
        "Hiring and development"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "projects": [
    {
      "name": "Orca",
      "description": "Enterprise AI assistant for 501 employees: deep research over company data, South Pole-format documents, decks and proposals, position-aware access; 560,000+ requests at 99.99% success.",
      "keywords": [
        "Enterprise AI",
        "Deep Research",
        "RAG",
        "Cloud Run",
        "IAM"
      ],
      "entity": "South Pole"
    },
    {
      "name": "Orca Semantics",
      "description": "Governed semantic layer on self-hosted OpenMetadata: version-controlled definitions, named domain owners, streamed into Orca as context.",
      "keywords": [
        "OpenMetadata",
        "Semantic Layer",
        "Governance",
        "Terraform"
      ],
      "entity": "South Pole"
    },
    {
      "name": "Orca Visuals",
      "description": "The visualisation layer on the semantic layer: dashboards defined as code against certified metrics, replacing Power BI (98 reports, 410 users) and removing ~200k EUR a year in licences.",
      "keywords": [
        "Lightdash",
        "Semantic layer",
        "BI-as-code",
        "Power BI"
      ],
      "entity": "South Pole"
    },
    {
      "name": "Data Marts Core",
      "description": "Orchestration for 1,800+ dbt models migrated from dbt Cloud to self-hosted Dagster on GKE in three weeks, avoiding a three-year renewal at ~27k EUR a year.",
      "keywords": [
        "Dagster",
        "dbt",
        "GKE",
        "Cloud Build"
      ],
      "entity": "South Pole"
    },
    {
      "name": "Data Foundation Plan",
      "description": "Seven-workstream data strategy to 2028 (semantic layer, orchestration, visualisation, AI platform, data quality, access governance, SLAs), costed at ~295k EUR/yr direct savings and adopted by ExCo.",
      "keywords": [
        "Strategy",
        "Roadmap",
        "Governance",
        "FinOps"
      ],
      "entity": "South Pole"
    },
    {
      "name": "Data Access Governance",
      "description": "Self-service access portal that opens Terraform IAM grant pull requests through a GitHub App; 40+ hours a month returned to the team.",
      "keywords": [
        "IAM",
        "Terraform",
        "GitHub App",
        "Governance"
      ],
      "entity": "South Pole"
    },
    {
      "name": "Cost Deep Dive",
      "description": "FinOps dashboard across 195 GCP projects with P99 anomaly alerting; caught a 6x BigQuery spend spike and cut marts query spend 46% year on year.",
      "keywords": [
        "FinOps",
        "BigQuery",
        "Looker Studio",
        "Anomaly Detection"
      ],
      "entity": "South Pole"
    },
    {
      "name": "Enterprise Data Platform Migration",
      "description": "18,000+ cloud resources migrated from Pulumi to modular Terraform; IAM, networking and policy-as-code standardised for five business units.",
      "keywords": [
        "Terraform",
        "GCP",
        "Infrastructure-as-Code",
        "CI/CD"
      ],
      "entity": "South Pole"
    }
  ],
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