Rich Leyshon
Senior Data Scientist / Ai Engineer
About
Senior Ai Engineer, specialising in applied agentic and generative Ai, WSGI web applications, Ai observability, geospatial modelling, and production-grade analytical systems. Reimagining public sector delivery through responsible Ai adoption.
Work Experience
Senior Ai Engineer
Ai Engineer responsible for scaling national Ai services, building observability platforms, and developing applied agentic Ai solutions.
Highlights
- Justice Transcribe
- Senior Ai engineer on Justice Transcribe, automating probation meeting documentation using Ai transcription and LLM-generated summaries.
- Scaled the service from a 300-user pilot to a national rollout for 40,000 probation officers, enabling consistent, compliant meeting records.
- Delivered 34,000+ transcriptions and summaries by Nov 2025 with a 4.7/5 average satisfaction score.
- Added robust engineering practices including automated tests, coverage reporting, dependency validation, and secure CI/CD workflows.
- Ai Observability & Langfuse Platform
- Maintainer of the Unit's Langfuse observability backend, supporting monitoring and evaluation of all LLM completions across the directorate.
- Deployed a self-hosted Langfuse instance in Azure using Terraform and Helm, with automated SSL (cert-manager + Let's Encrypt), DNS delegation, and hardened networking.
- Built comprehensive LLM quality monitoring pipelines: async context tracing, prompt versioning, latency and cost dashboards, and LLM-as-a-judge evaluation.
- Engineered reliable LLM integration pipelines using Vertex Ai and Azure Cognitive Services with structured output, retry/fallback logic, and content moderation.
- Governance & Capability
- Delivered interactive technical capability workshops on test-driven development to Justice Digital data scientists.
Office for National Statistics – Data Science Campus
January 2022 – August 2025
Senior Data Scientist, Strategic Tools & Technologies Team
Managed data science teams to innovate and deliver on emerging analytical priorities and tools. Delivering quality-assured systems and granular, applied geospatial analysis at national scale.
Highlights
- Led work on urban public transport performance across UK and international cities, delivering a reproducible toolkit for measuring transport network performance internationally.
- Secured £0.5 million in HMRC Economic Innovation Fund funding by personally writing a successful research bid for innovation in local transport statistics.
- Chaired the working group producing ONS Campus guidance on open-source development standards, leading to the publication of the ONS Campus Open Source Development Guidance.
- Lead on research partnership with Alan Turing Institute, applying constrained optimisation research using agent-based modelling and network analysis to evaluate Local Authority progress against the UK Levelling Up agenda policy priorities.
- Expert panellist at The Alan Turing Institute's 'Policy Priorities & Ai for SDGs'.
- Scrum Master certified, experienced in Agile DSDM project management, kanban and Gantt.
Office for National Statistics – Data Science Campus
April 2020 – January 2022
Head of Faculty & Data Science Lecturer, Campus Faculty
Lecturer and faculty lead delivering training and capability building across the UK public sector and international NSOs.
Highlights
- Promoted to Faculty Lead, managing a multi-disciplinary service delivery team in preparation for a 5× expansion of the Cross Government Data Science Graduate Training Programme.
- Led development of advanced geospatial training in collaboration with Ordnance Survey, including preparation of advanced geospatial course content for UK government departments, Caribbean statistical offices, and Kenya National Bureau of Statistics.
- Guest speaker at Royal Statistical Society 2020 and 2021 conferences on transparency, reproducibility in national statistics and UK Data Science as a global public good.
Data Cymru
January 2020 – April 2020
Statistician
Automation and secure ETL development for local authority datasets.
Highlights
- Automated survey analysis and parameterised reporting in R Markdown.
- Quality Assurance of Local Authority redistribution modelling in Python.
- Developed ETL pipelines powering secure updates of children’s care placement data for Welsh authorities, combining Power BI frontend with Python ETL pipeline.
Wales Audit Office
September 2018 – December 2019
Financial Analyst
Automated analytics for audit, fraud detection, and performance review.
Highlights
- Automated counter-fraud testing of general ledger transactions.
- Developed Power BI dashboards and automated R Markdown reporting.
- Delivered Power BI training nationally to internal and external stakeholders.
St Illtyd's, Fitzalan, and Bassaleg High Schools
January 2007 – December 2017
Teacher of Science
Teacher of Science delivering biology, chemistry and physics to A-level standard.
Highlights
- Curated differentiated materials to support varied learning needs.
- Developed advanced communication, time management and conflict resolution skills.
- Experienced in the effective communication of technical subject matter to diverse student audiences.
Awards
-
2023
Government Geography Profession
Government Geography Profession Award
Awarded for outstanding contribution to public sector geography, recognising leadership in developing advanced geospatial training content in collaboration with Ordnance Survey.
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2022
Government Analysis Function
Analysis in Government Awards - Shortlisted (Inclusion)
Shortlisted for enabling accessible data science training across government and international statistical offices.
Volunteer
Mentor
Supporting social mobility and sponsoring a refugee transitioning into a Digital, Data and Technology (DDaT) role through the MoJ Catapult mentorship programme.
Contact
Cardiff / Newport, Wales GB
Education
-
2018 2019
Acorn Learning Solutions
Diploma
Data Analytics
Courses- Data management infrastructure, analytical tools, data science
- Big data analytics, distributed and cloud compute, data engineering
- Event-driven and procedural programming
- Principles of data management and advanced data representations
- Statistical analysis of data sets
- Data analysis tools and data science methodologies
-
2006 2007
University of Wales Institute, Cardiff
Post Graduate Certificate in Education
Science
-
2002 2005
Cardiff University
BSc (Hons)
Biology
Grade: 2:1
Skills
Programming Languages
Expert
Python
R
SQL
Ai & Machine Learning
Expert
Generative Ai
Agentic Ai
Azure OpenAi
RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation)
LLM Integration
Prompt Engineering & Evaluation
LLM Observability
Cloud & Infrastructure
Advanced
Azure
Terraform
Helm
Kubernetes
Docker
CI/CD
GitHub Actions
Azure Cognitive Services
Web Development
Advanced
FastAPI
Next.js
React
WSGI
REST APIs
Shiny
Data & Analytics
Expert
Geospatial Analysis
Network Analysis
Agent-Based Modelling
ETL Pipelines
Microsoft Power Platform
R Stats
DevOps & Infrastructure
Advanced
CI/CD Pipelines
Docker
Terraform
GitHub Actions
Shell Scripting
Makefiles
Automated Testing
Coverage with CodeCov
Monitoring & Observability
Project Management
Advanced
Agile DSDM
Scrum Master
Kanban & Gantt
Stakeholder Management
Compliance and Quality Assurance
Publications
UK Output Area Public Transport Isochrones
ONS Data Science Campus
2022
Lead developer on statistical publication of novel accessibility geometries and metrics for public transport performance across all UK Output Areas, published to ONS Geoportal.
Reproducible Analytical Pipelines Training Programme
ONS Data Science Campus
2 2020
Developed and delivered comprehensive training packages on reproducible analysis, programming, version control, and big data analytics across UK government departments, Caribbean statistical offices, and Kenya National Bureau of Statistics.
Interests
Ai Ethics & Responsible Ai
Ai Governance
Public Sector Ai Adoption
Transparency in Ai Systems
Open Source Development
Code in the Open
Reproducible Analysis
Developer Standards