Duncan Walker
Principal Data Scientist
London, England, United Kingdom
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolDuncan Walker is a Principal Data Scientist at the BBC with eight years of experience bridging theoretical physics and production-scale machine learning and observability. He came through the BBC R&D engineer scheme after completing a PhD in theoretical particle physics at Durham, and now leads projects spanning recommendation algorithms, object tracking, and cloud monitoring using the ELK stack and Grafana. Comfortable across Python, FORTRAN and large-scale Grid/OpenStack environments, he brings a strong quantitative background in high-performance numerical simulation to data-driven product work. An active open-source contributor, he has enhanced Grafana dashboard tooling (grafanalib) with Elasticsearch integrations and statusmap support to improve observability workflows. Beyond engineering, he’s taught Python to undergraduates and applies the discipline of ensemble performance as a part-time jazz musician, hinting at a collaborative, improvisational approach to problem solving. Located in London, he combines research-rigor with production engineering to turn complex data problems into reliable, maintainable systems.
8 years of coding experience
4 years of employment as a software developer
Theoretical and Mathematical Physics, Theoretical and Mathematical Physics at CTEQ School on QCD and Electroweak Phenomenology 2017Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Elementary Particle Physics, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Elementary Particle Physics at Durham UniversityMPhys, Theoretical Physics, Class I, 82.8% Average, MPhys, Theoretical Physics, Class I, 82.8% Average at University of DurhamPhysics, Physics at GraSPA 2014
Stackoverflow
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Github Skills (10)
ed2551910
monitoring10
elasticsearch10
elasticsearchquery10
dashboard10
grafana10
aws-elasticsearch10
python10
elasticsearch-api10
amazon-elasticsearch10
Programming languages (4)
Github contributions (5)
weaveworks/grafanalib
Mar 2020 - May 2020
Python library for building Grafana dashboards
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:27 commits, 7 PRs, 1 comment in 1 month
Contributions summary:Duncan primarily contributed to the development of the `grafanalib` library, focusing on enhancing its Elasticsearch integration. They implemented features like the Statusmap panel support, adding classes and functionalities to support the plugin. Furthermore, the user worked on bug fixes related to query ordering, adding and updating various metric aggregators, and improving the library's documentation. Their work also included improvements to the codebase such as PEP8 fixes and whitespace updates.
python-librarypythongrafana-dashboardsdashboardsedsl
scarlehoff/pyHepGrid
Oct 2017 - Oct 2019
Tool for distributed computing management geared towards HEP applications.
Contributions:329 commits, 23 PRs, 50 pushes in 2 years
distributed-computingdistributed-systemshepcomputingdistributed
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