From July 2023 to July 2025 I worked at Cranfield University (MK:U) as a Senior AI & Data Engineer, Consultant, and Mentor — embedded with partners including BAE Systems, Santander, Microsoft and HM Government.
Engineer
I designed and built applied AI/GenAI systems in regulated defence and fintech environments. Four systems reached production within six months of first client project kickoff.
- Co-developed a proof-of-concept agentic auditing system for Santander; progressed to production use on Azure with FastAPI, vector databases, PEFT/LoRA and LLM evaluation workflows — automating 85% of manual audit sampling, cutting review cycle time by 60%, and reducing inference costs by 40% vs base-model serving via PEFT/LoRA.
- Co-developed a proof-of-concept computer vision pipeline for BAE Systems; progressed to industry use with PyTorch, OpenCV and Docker/Kubernetes, identifying vehicles and extracting telemetry from visual data streams at 94% detection accuracy, processing 500+ hours of footage per month in regulated defence environments.
Consultant
As an engineer embedded through Cranfield-MK:U, I worked with 100+ client staff on production delivery — translating research and industry practice into shipped systems for partner organisations across fintech, defence and the public sector. Partners included household names such as Mercedes, Santander and Nationwide, as well as defence contractors such as Lockheed Martin, Roake, MBDA and BAE Systems.
Mentor
Alongside delivery work I was course leader for Digital Technologies Solutions, teaching Digital Maths and Programming, Robotics and Advanced Programming to apprentice students and staff from partner companies. I helped launch the UK’s first Robotics degree apprenticeship, mentored and developed other lecturers, and defined the use, policies and practices of AI across the University.
