James Leslie
AI & Data Science Manager
Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolJames Leslie is an AI & Data Science Manager with nine years of hands-on experience building data products and leading analytics teams across public and private sectors. Now based in Auckland after moving from Cape Town, he specialises in applying LLMs and NLP to transform unstructured customer feedback into operational insights, typically delivering solutions via Dataiku pipelines and Power BI or Streamlit apps. His background spans end-to-end data engineering on Snowflake and AWS, graph database proof-of-concepts, and production-focused ML for retail and transport use cases. He combines technical leadership—shaping project lifecycle best practices—with frequent stakeholder engagement to ensure solutions are usable and impactful. Trained with an MSc in Data Science and a BSc in Geomatics Engineering, he brings a rare mix of spatial thinking and statistical rigor to transport analytics. Colleagues describe him as curious and continually learning—true to his motto that keeping fresh skills prevents becoming an “old dog.”
9 years of coding experience
5 years of employment as a software developer
MSc, Data Science, MSc, Data Science at University of Cape TownHigh School, IEB, High School, IEB at Somerset CollegeUniversity of South Africa
English
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (22)
sentence-embeddings10
topic-models10
topic-modeling10
tf-idf10
transformers9
machine-learning9
nlp9
natural-language-processing8
bert8
prediction-model7
margin7
sports-data7
conda7
os-agnostic7
python7
Programming languages (3)
Github contributions (5)
Devonquendi/fpl-app
Aug 2020 - Jan 2025
Data-driven decision-making tool for FPL
Contributions:8 reviews, 20 PRs, 153 pushes in 4 years 6 months
data-drivendecision-makingfpldecision
datahounds/what-whale
Apr 2020 - Feb 2022
Image classification web app using Flask and PyTorch
Contributions:1 PR, 12 pushes, 2 branches in 1 year 10 months
pytorchpythonflaskimage-classificationclassification
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