Professional Overview
AI engineer and technical co-founder (Cape Town, SAST), available for remote contracts of up to 12 months. I build and run production AI systems for banks, insurers, telecoms, retailers and the public sector. Co-founder of Botlhale AI (NVIDIA Inception, Creative Destruction Lab), shipping speech, NLP and ML products since 2019. Currently, I lead engineering on Vela, a platform that transcribes, scores and analyses contact-centre calls and chats. It processes roughly 300k interactions a month for 11 client organisations. I’m still very hands-on across the whole lifecycle: Customer success: I run POCs, set up client organisations and build POC reports and insight packs. Support: I handle client queries, feature requests and bug reports directly. Engineering: I write the code and tests, including LLM scorecards and health checks that catch systematic scoring errors. Ops: I run CI/CD and deployments. Over the past few months, Claude has automated most of this routine work. I stay in the loop to review what it implements before it ships, which has given me more capacity to take on contract work alongside Vela.
Areas of Expertise
AI & Machine Learning Engineers
Design, train, and ship production ML models — from data pipelines to model inference at scale. Covers supervised learning, neural networks, LLM integration, and model optimisation.
data science & analytics
Extract business insights from raw data using statistical modelling, predictive analytics, A/B testing, and interactive dashboards.
AI Product & Strategy
Translate AI capabilities into product roadmaps, define success metrics, and drive adoption across engineering and business teams.
MLOps & AI Infrastructure
Architect scalable ML infrastructure — CI/CD for ML, model versioning, experiment tracking, monitoring, and cloud deployment on AWS, GCP, or Azure.
