Principal Data Scientist

Justice Chukwuka

Senior/Principal Data & AI Scientist

Lagos, Nigeria • +234 903-***-**** • **********@*****.*** • linkedin.com/in/jchukwuka2 • medium.com/@chuka19952 Professional Summary

Principal Data & AI Scientist with 5+ years delivering high-impact AI solutions across finance, healthcare, agriculture, and logistics. Proven track record of scaling ML systems on multi-terabyte datasets—cutting latency by 30%, accelerating decision velocity, and mentoring 1,500+ learners to new data roles. Trusted advisor to C-level and investment teams on AI product-market fit and go-to-market strategy. Skilled at building and leading cross-functional teams (up to 6 engineers) to deploy production-grade pipelines, real-time analytics, and agentic LLM workflows. Core Skills

● ML & MLOps: Kubernetes, Docker, CI/CD (GitLab CI, Jenkins), Kubeflow, Vertex AI, Pinecone, LangChain, n8n

● Cloud Platforms: AWS (SageMaker, Lambda), GCP (BigQuery, Vertex), Azure ML

● Data Engineering: Spark, Hadoop, Kafka, Airflow, SQL/NoSQL (Postgres, MongoDB)

● Modeling & Algorithms: Supervised/Unsupervised Learning, Deep Learning

(TensorFlow, PyTorch), NLP, CV, LLM prompt engineering

● Leadership & Strategy: AI roadmap development, stakeholder alignment, team leadership (6+), curriculum design

Professional Experience

Independent AI/ML Consultant

Oct 2024 – Present

Engaged via Infollion Research Services, Coleman Research, and GLG to advise clients across financial services, technology, and investment management.

● Led AI/ML roadmap creation with senior management, accelerating project kickoff by 30%.

● Advised on AI products and vendors, LLM, GPUs, hardware integrations and AI strategy, informing $2M+ in investment decisions.

● Conducted 1:1 consultations with asset managers and consultancies, reducing due diligence timelines by in the AI and hardware industry 35%. Principal Software Engineer (AI) — Non Disclosure Agreement Dec 2024 – Apr 2025

● Architected, designed and led initiatives for real-time anomaly detection on 2M+ daily events—cutting mean API latency by 30% and boosting SLO compliance from 92% to 99.5%.

● Designed and led iinitiatives that Launched agentic LLM workflows on BigQuery

& Vertex AI, automating 45% of customer queries and reducing support costs by 20%.

● Streamlined GCP model deployments, shrinking release cycles from 3 days to under 6 hours via containerized pipelines.

Lead Data Scientist — Jowael Tech

Jun 2020 – Oct 2022

● Designed and delivered a 10-module ML curriculum to 500+ trainees, achieving a 90% completion rate and 75% job placement within 6 months.

● Built an insurance risk model on 3M+ customer records, improving accuracy by 22% and enhancing underwriting decisions.

Data Analyst Session Lead — Udacity

May 2022 – Sep 2022

● Mentored 1,500+ students through live sessions and 100+ code reviews, driving a 65% job-offer rate in data roles within 3 months. AI/ML Mentor & Data Scientist — Kaggle

May 2019 – Nov 2023

● Guided 200+ competition participants to 5 top 10 global finishes.

● Published solution notebooks (10k+ views) for Cassava Leaf Disease (top 5%) and US Patent NLP, establishing community best practices. Product & Research Data Scientist — Various (IndabaX, Access Bank, etc.) May 2019 – Jul 2023

● Co authored IndabaX poster on malaria parasite detection; adopted by 2 research labs.

● Engineered credit-scoring pipelines for Access Bank—processing 2M+ records to increase approval rates by 18%.

● Led a 4-engineer team to productionize fraud detection at 10k TPS, reducing false positives by 15% and saving $2M annually.

Project Data Scientist — Data Science Nigeria

Oct 2020 – Jun 2021

● Built ETL pipelines (Spark, Kafka) for 500k+ weekly student records in Learn@Home, doubling user engagement.

● Deployed speech-to-text analytics for call centers, cutting manual review time by 60%.

Data Scientist — Rise Networks

Oct 2019 – Dec 2019

● Automated governance insights with 10+ Tableau dashboards, reducing analysis time by 50%.

Machine Learning Engineer — Analytics Vidhya

Jul 2019 – Oct 2019

● Developed ML models for Black Friday sales and loan delinquency; improved forecast accuracy by 12%.

Machine Learning Engineer — Zindi

Feb 2019 – Nov 2020

● Created fraud detection and ETA prediction models for logistics challenges; achieved 85% precision and 90% delivery accuracy.

Education & Certifications

B.Sc., Applied Geophysics, University of Calabar (2012–2017) Project Management Professional (PMP)

Azure ML: Perform Cloud Data Science, Microsoft (2022) DSN AI Engineering Bootcamp 2019(ML & DL)

Arize University: ML Observability(2024)

Y Combinator: Startup School 2019

References and detailed project links available upon request.

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