Testimonials

Aeden Thomas, Software Engineer

I had the pleasure of working closely alongside Stephen at Shoutt, where he served as our Lead Data Scientist. He was the first data scientist I collaborated with, and he set an exceptionally high standard for what cross-functional partnership between engineering and data science should look like. Data science and applied AI often demand weeks or months of deep, painstaking iteration, and Stephen’s patience in this area is extraordinary. He is a true expert at diving into complex, ambiguous data, diagnosing edge cases, and methodically driving up accuracy through disciplined evaluation loops. Just as impressive was his approach to problem-solving and the sheer clarity of his documentation. Whether he was engineering prompt and evaluation frameworks or building out our dashboards to give the team visibility into user funnels, Stephen always documented his reasoning, test suites, and trade-offs meticulously. He took the mystery out of the AI layer and made complex systems easy for the engineering team to understand and build upon. Stephen is a fantastic data scientist, a patient and clear-headed thinker, and an outstanding teammate. Any team would be lucky to have him, and I recommend him without hesitation.

Al Thomson, Analytics Engineer

As a new starter, Stephen ramped up exceptionally quickly, demonstrating strong ownership of complex systems, a clear understanding of the business, and confidence in the day-to-day analytical work. Stephen excels at designing repeatable, well-documented data products that directly address real business pain points. He doesn’t just analyse problems but builds scalable solutions that others can easily understand, reuse, and extend. That combination of clarity, structure, and innovation genuinely sets him apart. On top of this, Stephen is a strong communicator, who can translate technical work into clear, actionable insight for non-technical stakeholders. Any organisation looking for someone who can both build robust data solutions and drive impact through them would be fortunate to have him.

Bahar Rezaei, Data Scientist

I had the pleasure of collaborating with Stephen on a project to build a personalized conversational meditation app. Stephen’s exceptional people skills, exemplified through strong communication, teamwork, and leadership in an agile environment, were instrumental in the project’s success. He demonstrated a deep understanding of product development, skillfully bridging theoretical insights with practical implementation. Stephen not only excels in quick coding and efficient technicality but also brings a positive energy and generous spirit to teamwork, readily sharing his knowledge and ideas. I wholeheartedly recommend Stephen for any data science role.

Christian Liedl, Data Scientist

I met Stephen during a data science boot camp, and had the pleasure to work with him on a project to predict housing damage during the 2015 earthquake in Gorkha, Nepal. Stephen has great intuition for what are relevant patterns in data sets. His tremendous experience in data science, data engineering, and statistics was super helpful for guiding decisions about choosing the right machine learning model. Beyond his technical skills, he is a very kind, humble, and emotionally intelligent person and it was simply a joy to collaborate with him!

Duncan Moss, Clinical Psychologist & Researcher

I am a Clinical Psychologist and Researcher with over 30 years experience and have known Stephen for over 10 years. In that time we have collaborated (and I have participated) on a number of projects and I have come to know their abilities very well. Stephen is an extremely capable Researcher with a mastery of a wide range of research skills. In my experience, they are able to work with both data and people very capably. Stephen has a particular ability at synthesising wide ranging data - quantitative and qualitative - and putting these into a clear and coherent context. Their writing skills are extremely advanced in my opinion. I’ve also witnessed Stephen working closely with colleagues and participants, for example creatively organising, hosting and facilitating events with a wide range of people involved. Stephen’s calm, mindful and friendly demeanour and quiet leadership is always evident. I have no hesitation in recommending them as a fantastic asset to any organisation.

Jonathan Eadie, Co-founder, Shoutt

I worked very closely with Stephen at Shoutt. Stephen is a very talented Lead Data Scientist. He owned several large projects including classifying the role type for thousands of inconsistent job posts into clean, reliable data that we could match to users. He also lead the AI on our CV review tool where he engineered a substantial prompt framework and an evaluation framework. Throughout he worked with a freelance tester to produce a high quality chat bot type tool that helped users improve their CV. His work on the evaluation pipelines has been very impactful in helping us understand the quality of our product, what the gaps are and how to improve it. Stephen has also worked on the deployment and monitoring side of projects, including CI/CD pipelines and Devops style work of setting up and configuring models. He also built all our Python metrics dashboards to help us understand how the system is being used in production which has helped us spot issues users were having. Stephen is also a great communicator, he makes sure he understands the problem well, and ask thoughtful questions and always outlines a plan for how he is going to tackle a problem. He also moves fast, which is important in startups. On the personal side, I really enjoy working with Stephen. He has a lot of enthusiasm for building high quality AI systems, he is always very open, he is really good team player and is a great person. Overall, I would highly recommend Stephen, he would be a great asset to any company.

Joshua Nowak, Data Scientist

I had the pleasure of working with Stephen at Data Science Retreat (DSR) where I got to know him as a skilled data professional and a thoughtful, empathetic human. His curiosity and drive to explore new technologies impressed me the most. Stephen keenly follows the open-source space and always had interesting bits of knowledge to share. For his final project at DSR, he was not afraid to learn and combine multiple complex topics like LLM fine-tuning, EEG-based brain monitoring, and advanced speech processing. As a seasoned social psychologist, Stephen also excels at “zooming out” and considering the societal and business impact of his work. I am excited to see what Stephen creates next!

Krzysztof Buzar, Python Developer

Stephen consistently impressed me with his sharp intellect, technical savvy, and enthusiastic approach to learning. In my opinion, during the courses I took, Stephen always showed remarkable technical proficiency, an aptitude for quickly understanding complicated ideas, and an eagerness to learn throughout the courses. Since I like to teach with the use of anecdotes, it was wonderful to experience the resonance with them! On multiple occasions, Stephen demonstrated the capacity to solve problems creatively and with optimism, which is all one can hope for as a teacher during his classes. In addition to his technical prowess, Stephen is an enthusiastic person who is passionate about SOTA technologies, and I personally see a great future in IT for him.

Luke W. Huxham, Technology Leader & CTO

I had the pleasure of working with Stephen at Lightfoot, where he was a data scientist in my wider technology team. Stephen combines strong technical skill with a practical focus on what the business actually needs. He turned messy data into clear, reliable insight and explained it plainly to non-technical colleagues, which made his work genuinely useful rather than just interesting. He was curious, thorough and easy to work with, and he took ownership of problems through to a finished result. His work on field based experimental design was genuinely impressive and helped us progress the product as a result. Any data team would benefit from having Stephen on board, and I’d recommend him without hesitation.

Mayra Codo, Data Analyst

I had the pleasure of working with Stephen … When I first started, Stephen was incredibly supportive. He took time to teach me new processes and was very patient every time I went to him with questions, which made all the difference in helping me to get up to speed. Stephen has a deep understanding of complex systems and an excellent ability to document his work with precision and clarity. It was a great pleasure working with Stephen, and I would highly recommend him to anyone looking for a talented, supportive, and driven team member!

Meg-John Barker, writer, mentor and associate at Centre for Transforming Sexuality and Gender, University of Brighton

I consider Stephen to be an exceptional researcher who would be an asset to any organisation. I have known Stephen for over a decade as a friend and colleague. I consider their work to be some of the most important and innovative in the field, and I frequently draw upon it in my own writing. We have also collaborated together on a number of projects. We have conducted and published research together, as well as co-organising several conferences and other events. Most recently, I was a stakeholder/participant on their major funded project: ‘Mapping Mindfulness’. I can therefore speak to Stephen’s abilities, professionalism, communication skills, and qualities as a researcher and colleague. The ‘Mapping Mindfulness’ project employed an innovative participatory co-design, which meant that stakeholder/participants were engaged with in various ways throughout the research process. I certainly found that this approach enabled me to feel invested in the project, with the potential to engage in ways that ensured that the outcomes of the research would be helpful in relation to my own work. In all of their research, Stephen demonstrates clear, enthusiastic and insightful engagement with their stakeholders and participants, and a consistent commitment to ethical principles.

Saleem Yaqub, Co-Founder, Shoutt

It was a pleasure working with Stephen as our Lead Data Scientist at Shoutt. He has a real talent for taking ambiguous problems and turning them into clean, practical solutions the business can act on. His work on our data and AI has been central to how our product works and how we measure and improve its quality. He’s also great at explaining complex ideas in plain terms, which made him a valuable voice in decisions well beyond his own remit. Reliable, thoughtful and easy to work with. Any team hiring for data science or applied AI would be lucky to have him, and I’d happily work with him again.

Dr. Tristan Behrens, Data Scientist

I met Stephen at a data science boot camp in Berlin, where I was the teacher. What struck me immediately about the fine person that Stephen is, is his interdisciplinary nature, which is an asset for any serious undertaking in the fields we so love (Data Science and AI). Stephen is perfectly capable of implementing his ideas in a very thorough way. I was impressed by the project he was working on.