Gordon Botha Email & Phone Number

Christchurch, Nz

Austin, Texas, United States

Backd.com is a B2B lender with multiple awards and accolades under its belt. Our focus is enabling "the man in the arena" (see https://youtu.be/A311CnTjfos), helping them make things happen for their business. At Backd I look after our cloud infrastructure, data engineering and predictive analytics.

New Zealand

Woolworths is one of the largest retailers in Australia & New Zealand, with a $7.5B turnover in 2023 in NZ alone. At Woolies, I was the Lead Data Scientist, as well as the team lead for Machine Learning Operations (NZ). I reported into the Chapter Lead for Data Science. I worked on projects in the customer loyalty, automation and LLM special projects. I also developed the long term strategy for the ML Ops team.

Christchurch, Canterbury, New Zealand

Simple Machines is a specialist firm of expert consultants, data architects and software engineers building the next generation of data driven organisations, frameworks and software. They have offices in Christchurch, Sydney and London.At SM I consulted on Data Engineering / Data Science projects for Telecoms, Mining and Financial Services companies.

Pretoria, Gauteng, South Africa

Exports company with operations in South Africa, USA & Canada. Development of BioGas prototypes for poultry industry.I was one of the MDs of the company and handled various aspects of the operations cycle, such as marketing, product customisation and financials.

Cape Town Area, South Africa

Vodacom (Vodafone South Africa) has a client base of over 55 million customers, generating billions of data points per day. At Vodafone, I led and developed on projects in customer operations, cloud infrastructure development and big data analytics. The predominant technologies that I used on a daily basis were SQL, python, spark and h2o.ai, deployed on AWS/Hadoop.

Cape Town

JUMO (www.jumo.world) is a 100% cloud-based (AWS), full technology platform for building and running financial services. Jumo has dispersed more than 120+ million financial products via mobile payment infrastructure, with a value of more than $3.5 Billion, to 19 million customers (with 100 million potential customers on book).I initially joined JUMO as a Senior Data Scientist, and was later promoted to the Head of Data Science. The team handled aspects such as take up, churn, experimentation (A | B testing) and simulation.Jumo was an extremely fast growing start-up and so I was pulled into projects in a variety of disciplines. Besides the usual data science function, I was involved in large data engineering projects, and training junior members of data science and data engineering in SPARK / AWS.Key Technologies used: SQL, python, SPARK, sklearn, ml-lib, R, AWS EMR, AWS Redshift, AWS Sagemaker, Superset, jupyter notebooks, simpy

The Institute of Infectious Disease and Molecular Medicine was established in 2004 as a cross-faculty postgraduate research institute based within the University of Cape Town (UCT).I managed the data science / bioinformatics function for an exceptional research unit aiming at developing an HIV Vaccine based on superinfection events. The team handled all data-related functions, from raw data storage, ingestion, clustering, modelling, simulation and publication ready visualisation.Our work led to publications in NATURE MEDICINE & VIRUSES.Key Technologies used: python, AWS, R, django, sklearn, pandas, matplotlib, seaborn as well as a suite of Bioinformatics algorithms (blast, galaxy, ngs, 454)

Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa

I was contracted to build a portfolio solver for an investment management company that had outgrown its technology stack. Key Technologies used: python, sympy

Predictive Analytics consulting business. We serviced a number of varied contracts to enable one of the directors to develop our data product framework, and also to hire additional employees into the firm. We had contracts in Health Insurance claims prediction, designed and built a global blood sample management database for HIV samples spanning across multiple sites and multiple countries and epidemiological analysis of the HIV pandemic in Swaziland.Key Technologies used: python, django, sklearn, R, SQL

Stellenbosch, Western Cape, South Africa

SACEMA was part of a multi-international group of stakeholders that took part in a Treatment as Prevention Program in Swaziland to help combat the HIV epidemic there. The group was managed by STOP AIDS NOW, with Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI), the CDC and the Ministry of Swaziland being the other major stakeholders.My role was to do epidemiological modelling for SACEMA and to maintain relationships with the key stakeholders above. I travelled to Swaziland almost every 6 weeks to report on findings and attend strategic sessions and health conferences.Key Technologies used: python, matlab, SQL, git, partial differential equation solver libraries.

Advanced bioinformatics analysis on peptide microarray experiments. The work consisted of an end-to-end data analysis pipeline in python and R, with applied image recognition algorithms to detect signals in image data from the microarray results.Key Technologies used: python, R, applied image recognition algorithms

Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa

Yila Consulting was a small software engineering consultancy. I was a software development consultant and worked on a range of projects in python and javascript. Key Technologies used: python, javascript

Pretoria, Gauteng, South Africa

I ran payroll and tax for a large farm (part time) for an income during my undergraduate studies.

Master Of Science (Msc), Computer Science

Bsc (Hons) Mathematical Statistics, Bioinformatics

Bachelor Of Science (Bsc), Financial Mathematics

Education record