Edward Rycroft

Developing a fully integrated internal and client-facing platform for the lifecycle of content from ideation to production to publishing on social media. The chosen tech stack was Reflex as a full-stack framework (compiles frontend to React and backend to FastAPI) and Supabase for the database, storage, and authentication. For analytics, data pipelines were created in Python and deployed on Google Cloud using Cloud Scheduler, Pub/Sub Topics, Secret Manager, Cloud Run, Cloud Storage, Cloud SQL, and BigQuery, as well as Databricks with various notebooks and workflows integrating with Delta Tables using Pyspark and Pandas. This revolves around the retrieval, processing, and transformation of raw data through a medallion architecture, such that relevant insights could be extracted with AI and visualized on dashboards with monitoring and reporting on Looker Studio. For business intelligence and operations, custom tools were also developed to integrate with the database using Retool.

Supporting core objectives for the initial systems of an early-stage startup. The areas of involvement covered scalable and headless web scraping with connections to large-language models to ingest collections of information, where the developed data pipelines leveraged Google Cloud using Cloud Run, Cloud Storage, and BigQuery. These data pipelines were built in Python using various libraries, such as NumPy, Pandas, Playwright, HTTPX, and BeautifulSoup, and incorporated embedding-based retrieval using vector representations to enable efficient semantic search and ranking. A marketplace for sustainable companies was designed and built as a web application to explore the curated data, where Postgres on Supabase was used as the database and Reflex was used for the frontend and backend with websocket and stateful components.

Worked across a wide variety of industries in advanced business analytics, financial engineering, digital engineering, smart mining and manufacturing, and research. This involved engaging with clients (such as MTN, African Bank, Johannesburg Stock Exchange, Anglo American, and Lodox) and applying class-leading tools with an emphasis on MATLAB and Python (including libraries for statistics, machine learning, visualizations, and image processing). The fields of exposure ranged between software engineering and data science. Various introductory courses from MathWorks were completed, including Fundamentals, Programming Techniques, Object-Oriented Programming, and Data Processing And Visualization.

Achieved a result of A (>75%) with inclusion on the Dean's List; qualification for the Wits University Entrance Scholarship and Wits University Undergraduate Merit Scholarship; recipient of the Bernard Price Prize (most distinguished in mechanical engineering), William John Walker Gold Medal (most outstanding in the school of mechanical, industrial, and aeronautical engineering), productONE Design Award, Weir Minerals Design Award, South African Institution of Mechanical Engineering Ralph Sharp Award, and various certificates of merit. Graduated with distinction.