Robin Nicole, PhD

PhD, ML/AI engineer in London

Shipping AI to production one commit at a time

Senior ML engineer. RAG, agents, forecasting, MLOps.

See the work

You send a brief, I send back a working system.

Selected work

Three systems, shipped and still running

RAG concierge

Problem
Customer operations was the bottleneck. Every incoming question required manual search across scattered docs, past tickets, and dashboards. Latency was high, throughput was flat, and hiring would not have fixed it.
Build
RAG concierge end-to-end: document ingestion pipeline, vector retrieval over internal KB, retrieval-grounded LLM responses with inline citations, cost and safety guardrails, and an eval harness tracking answer faithfulness, citation coverage, and drift as content changed.
Outcome
2x operational throughput without headcount. Query latency dropped from minutes of manual search to sub-second retrieval. Still running in production, on budget and within SLO.

Demand forecasting at retail scale

Problem
Manual and coarse demand forecasts across European retail markets meant overstock in some places and stockouts in others, expensive both ways, with no way to scale the approach across markets and SKUs by hand.
Build
Demand forecasting and inventory pipelines across European markets on VertexAI and Kubeflow, BigQuery as the data layer. Hierarchical time-series models, automated retraining, and drift monitoring so forecasts stay honest as demand shifts.
Outcome
Forecasts running in production across multiple European markets, retrained automatically and monitored for drift, replacing manual estimates with a system the team can trust without babysitting.

Real-time NLP at a national publisher

Problem
One of the UK's largest news publishers needed to classify and route editorial content at scale, in real time. Manual tagging was too slow for the volume and editors had no reliable way to test what worked.
Build
NLP content-classification system over real-time data pipelines handling 100M+ monthly page views, plus an A/B testing framework built to be simple enough that editors used it day to day.
Outcome
Classification running in real time across 100M+ monthly page views. Editors used the A/B framework as part of their daily workflow.

FAQ

Common questions

What's your stack?
Python first. TensorFlow, PyTorch, scikit-learn, pandas, PySpark. GCP (VertexAI, Kubeflow, BigQuery) and AWS (EMR, S3). Docker. For LLM work: bare SDKs or LangChain/LlamaIndex depending on constraints, vector DBs (pgvector, Qdrant, Pinecone) as needed, eval harnesses always. I'm stack-flexible inside this range.
Do you handle MLOps or just modelling?
Both, with MLOps first. I care as much about monitoring, CI/CD, feature stores, eval infra, and incident retros as I do about the model.
How do you evaluate LLM outputs?
Layered. Offline eval sets (golden answers, LLM-as-judge where appropriate), online metrics with human spot checks, drift detection on content changes, cost/latency SLOs. For RAG specifically: retrieval recall on labelled queries, answer faithfulness, citation coverage. Evals ship with the system.
How does an engagement usually start?
Short intro call to scope the problem. Proposal with clear deliverables and timeline. Embedded with your team or working independently depending on what fits. Weekly review calls, handoff docs written for the engineer who takes over.

Services

What I ship

LLM & RAG systems

Retrieval-augmented chatbots, agents, and production LLM features. Prompt engineering, eval harnesses, cost controls, and the MLOps to keep them running. Python with SDKs or LangChain/LlamaIndex depending on constraints, vector DBs as needed (pgvector, Qdrant, Pinecone), cloud or self-hosted.

2 weeks to 3 months

Forecasting & demand modelling

Demand forecasting and optimization pipelines. Time-series models and hierarchical forecasting. Productionised on VertexAI/Kubeflow or your platform of choice.

4 weeks to multi-month embedded

ML platform & MLOps

Production-grade pipelines, monitoring, CI/CD for models, feature stores, eval infra, incident hygiene.

Retainer or scoped platform build

Experience

Prior work

Track record

Seven years of production ML across retail, adtech, media, and quantitative finance.

  1. Oct 2024 to present

    Senior ML Engineer · Major European retailer

    Demand forecasting across European retail markets. VertexAI and Kubeflow pipelines, BigQuery, Python.

  2. Jan 2022 to Sept 2024

    Senior Applied Scientist · Sojern

    ML for travel advertising. LLM-powered concierge (RAG chatbot). ML pipeline automation, eval harnesses, cost controls on prod LLM workloads.

  3. Sept 2019 to Jan 2022

    Senior Data Scientist · Reach plc

    NLP systems for one of the UK's largest news publishers. Content classification, real-time data pipelines, A/B testing framework editors actually used.

  4. May 2018 to Sept 2019

    Quantitative Analyst · Gambit Research

    ML models for market prediction. Signal research and backtesting in a quant trading environment.

About

About

Senior ML engineer. PhD Applied Mathematics, King's College London. Seven years of production ML across retail demand forecasting, adtech bidding, news NLP, and quant prediction.

Most of what I ship runs for years: demand forecasting and inventory across European retail, a RAG concierge that doubled ops throughput for a client, NLP classification over 100M+ monthly page views at a national publisher, and quant signals at a market-making firm.

I care about monitoring, eval harnesses, honest incident retros, and modelling choices that let the next engineer on-call sleep. I'll move fast, but I won't ship something I wouldn't want to own.

Stack

ML/AI
Deep Learning, NLP, LLMs, Agentic AI, Time Series, RAG
Languages
Python, SQL, C++
Frameworks
TensorFlow, PyTorch, scikit-learn, pandas, PySpark
Cloud/MLOps
VertexAI, Kubeflow, Docker, AWS, GCP

Contact

Get in touch

Brief in, reply within a week. If I'm not the right fit, I'll usually know who is.

Include: the problem, the data shape, your existing stack, and a rough timeline. No preamble needed.