// experience
Stantec - 2024 to Present
My role at Stantec is Digital Consultant, which is a fairly broad title. If I were to translate what I do day to day, I would describe it as AI and Data Analytics Automation Specialist. Stantec is a multinational consultancy with over 30,000 employees worldwide, and over the last year I have mainly helped our engineers make informed decisions within their roles using data, working with clients such as Yorkshire Water.
The skill I am most proud of, and the one that has had the biggest impact on the team, is my ability to mentor others. I really struggled to understand how Git and Azure DevOps worked when I first joined as a graduate, so my first step was to request that my training budget be deployed in this area. At times I would break repositories so badly that a few senior colleagues would have to help me debug what I had done.
After some training I became more than comfortable with version control. But I felt that was not enough, so I took it upon myself to arrange sessions with all the new graduates who joined the year after me and took the time to explain Git in an intuitive way, to avoid the same problems I had experienced. In doing so, it also helped me cement my own understanding.
I was awarded a team lead bonus for my contribution to turning around a project that had run into significant technical difficulties. The original modelling approach had proved less reliable than expected, and the project was in a difficult position with a disappointed client. I led the investigation into the root cause of the problems, assessed whether the existing model could be improved, and ultimately delivered a simpler and more defensible analysis under considerable time pressure.
A particular highlight was leading a presentation of the findings directly to the client. To explain the technical problem clearly, I used an analogy comparing the issue to driving a car, and the team lead noted that you could visibly see the client understanding the problem as a result. I was told this was far above the expectation of a graduate, and the nomination recognised both the quality of the analysis and the way I communicated openly and confidently throughout.
Rainwater Management Platform AI
Researched an appropriate evaluation framework for retrieval-augmented generation models for an AI chatbot, assessed tooling options, and built a small internal MVP to demonstrate how the platform could look to senior leaders.
Water Insight Web App Dashboard
Put forward by colleagues aware of my personal projects, I am building a site compliance dashboard into a new internal web application.
FFT Compliance Regulation Reporting and Scenario Simulation
Built a Python script to automate the calculation of compliance metrics for wastewater sites on behalf of a client.
Benefits Realisation Project
Created a dashboard to show clients whether their investment had delivered the environmental impact they had hoped for.
Storm Overflow Automated Analysis
Automated Python scripting to collect data from the government's hydrology data API and generate HTML reports for use by modellers.