Chris Ballard
Norwich, England, United Kingdom
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolChris Ballard is a Fractional Head of AI and seasoned AI/ML engineer with 25 years' applied experience and a decade in senior roles, helping £20m–£500m organisations turn AI from a cost centre into measurable ROI. He blends hands-on engineering—deploying scalable LLM/RAG systems, multi-agent pipelines and production ML—with strategic leadership, having built and led teams from startup prototypes to enterprise deployments. Notable engagements include architecting a climate-policy semantic search showcased at COP26, driving a 20% improvement in email threat detection at Tessian, and automating retail space planning workflows for StoreSpace. Comfortable moving between rapid prototyping and disciplined production (AWS Lambda, Spark, LangGraph, LlamaIndex), he focuses on cutting wasted pilot spend while balancing short-term wins with long-term model governance. Based in Norwich, he pairs deep technical breadth with board-level communication and a practical knack for turning research into product impact.
10 years of coding experience
22 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Science (MSc), Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, Master of Science (MSc), Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining at University of East AngliaMachine Learning course, Machine Learning course at courseraBSc (Hons), Physics, BSc (Hons), Physics at University of Bristol
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (23)
console10
windows9
command-line9
cmd9
windows-terminal9
windows-console7
few-shot-learning7
sentence6
sentence-transformers6
nlp5
nlg5
electra5
natural-language-processing4
kotlin3
bert3
Programming languages (4)
Github contributions (5)
climatepolicyradar/policy-search
Sep 2021 - Mar 2024
Contributions:9 reviews, 15 PRs, 13 pushes in 2 years 6 months
tofferb/justifiedai-web
Feb 2021 - Feb 2021
Contributions:40 pushes, 1 branch in 1 day
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.