Vetted Data Scientists in Illinois

“ML/NLP practitioner with a master’s thesis focused on domain-adaptive knowledge distillation for LLMs (LLaMA2/sheared LLaMA), showing improved perplexity and ROUGE-L on biomedical data. Also built real-world data linking and search systems: integrated ClinicalTrials.gov with FAERS using fuzzy matching + embeddings, and delivered an LLM-powered FAQ recommender at Hyperledger using sentence-transformers, FAISS, and fine-tuning to mitigate embedding drift.”

“Built and shipped production improvements to a Paylocity RAG-based AI assistant, redesigning retrieval into a hybrid HNSW + keyword pipeline and using tuned RRF to fuse rankings—cutting latency by ~2s and reducing token usage by ~5000. Previously spearheaded Apache Airflow integration across ETL pipelines at Acuity Knowledge Partners, creating reusable templates and automated triggers to reduce manual job monitoring.”

“Built and deployed a production RAG-based multi-agent chatbot during an internship to help consultants answer client questions and guide users through new IT systems with step-by-step instructions. Demonstrates hands-on experience with LangGraph/LangChain/Google ADK, unstructured document parsing and chunking for RAG, and a reliability-first approach to agent workflows (metrics, fallbacks, human-in-the-loop, guardrails).”

“Data Analyst at U.S. Cellular who built production LLM solutions, including a Tableau-embedded chatbot that converts natural language questions into Oracle SQL and returns actionable KPI insights for non-technical users. Also authored MAD-CTI, a multi-agent LLM system for dark web hacker forum threat intelligence (published in IEEE Access) that outperformed single-agent approaches by 14%.”

“ML/NLP practitioner with experience building an embedding-based ad matching and search system at Vericast (BERT embeddings + similarity search) to replace a third-party taxonomy approach, evaluated via a human-curated gold standard. Also built a custom NER pipeline at Allstate for auto accident claims calls using a bidirectional LSTM and achieved 90%+ F1, with a strong emphasis on production-grade ML workflows (testing, CI/CD, orchestration, versioning, validation).”

“Data/ML practitioner with experience applying NLP and classical ML to large-scale customer data (2B+ records) for segmentation, prediction, and survey-text classification, delivering measurable business impact (~18% engagement efficiency). Has hands-on entity resolution across multi-source datasets and has built embedding-based semantic search using SentenceBERT + a vector database with domain fine-tuning (~20% relevance improvement), plus production workflow experience with Spark/Airflow and cloud tooling (AWS/Azure).”

“LLM/ML engineer who has shipped an enterprise RAG-based Q&A system (LangChain/LlamaIndex, FAISS + Azure Cognitive Search, GPT-3.5/4 via OpenAI/Azure OpenAI) to production on Docker + Kubernetes/OpenShift, tackling hallucinations, retrieval quality, latency/cost, and RBAC/IAM security. Also partnered with operations leaders to turn manual reporting into an LLM-powered summarization and forecasting dashboard driven by real KPIs and iterative stakeholder feedback.”

“Data/NLP practitioner with experience in both financial services (Truist) and government (USDA), including an NLP-driven analysis of EU regulations to anticipate US regulatory focus and a major redesign/cleaning of complex pathogen lab-test public datasets. Built production data-quality pipelines with Dagster, Pandera, and Azure Synapse, and is comfortable validating hypotheses with historical backtesting and SME-driven quality controls.”

“Robotics software/ML engineer who built perception and navigation-related ML systems for autonomous supermarket carts, including object detection, shelf recognition, and obstacle avoidance. Strong ROS/ROS2 practitioner who optimized real-time performance (reported 50% latency reduction) and deployed containerized ROS/ML pipelines at scale using Docker, Kubernetes, and CI/CD.”

“AI/ML engineer with forensic analytics and healthcare claims experience (Optum), building production LLM/RAG systems to surface context-driven fraud patterns from unstructured claim notes and explain risk to investigators. Strong in large-scale retrieval performance tuning, legacy API integration with reliability patterns (SQS, circuit breakers), and MLOps orchestration on Airflow/Kubernetes with rigorous testing, monitoring, and stakeholder-friendly interpretability.”

“Built a production multi-agent LLM system at Live Nation on Databricks (LangGraph/LangChain) that let venue/event teams ask questions in Slack, auto-generated optimized route schedules, and produced inventory/stocking recommendations from historical SQL data and venue trends. Improved reliability by tightening prompts with strict JSON schemas, providing sample questions/SQL, and adding guardrails plus synthetic/edge-case testing, while iterating with event managers and senior VPs via prototypes and feedback loops.”