James Laird-smith
Senior Data Scientist
London, England, United Kingdom
Summary
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Senior🎓
Top SchoolJames Laird-smith is a Senior Data Scientist based in London with eight years of experience building data-driven solutions across financial and media institutions. He has progressed from data specialist roles in Cape Town to senior data science positions at the Bank of England, bringing deep domain knowledge in finance supported by an MCom in Finance from the University of Cape Town and a thesis on equity pricing. Proficient in R and SQL, James combines rigorous quantitative training with practical production experience delivering analytics at pace for the Financial Times and major banks. He excels at turning complex financial questions into reproducible models and pipelines, often bridging research-grade techniques with operational constraints in regulated environments. Colleagues value his pragmatic approach to model interpretability and his track record of moving analytics from prototype to policy-informing deployment.
8 years of coding experience
7 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Commerce Finance, Master of Commerce Finance at University of Cape Town
Stackoverflow
21reputation
1kreached
1answer
0questions
Github Skills (94)
quarto10
dplyr10
r-package10
grammar10
r9
recurring9
parser9
ggplot9
data-transformation9
manipulation9
missing-data9
bit9
bookdown8
duckdb8
data-manipulation8
Programming languages (6)
Github contributions (5)
jameslairdsmith/Zim_2018_Election_Data
Aug 2018 - Oct 2023
Contributions:4 pushes, 1 branch in 5 years 2 months
jameslairdsmith/curriculum_vitae
Jan 2019 - Oct 2024
My resume.
Contributions:4 PRs, 64 pushes, 4 branches in 5 years 9 months
kaiosphonetics
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