This is an Online event, the Teams link will be published on the right of this page for those who have registered. 18:30: From Raw to Refined: Building Production Data Pipelines That Scale - Pradeep Kalluri 19:55 Prize Draw - Packt eBooks

Session details: From Raw to Refined: Building Production Data Pipelines That Scale - Pradeep Kalluri Every organization needs to move data from source systems to analytics platforms, but most teams struggle with reliability at scale. In this talk, I'll share the three-zone architecture pattern I use to build production data pipelines that process terabytes daily while maintaining data quality and operational simplicity.

You'll learn: - Why the traditional "single pipeline" approach breaks at scale - How to structure pipelines using Raw\, Curated\, and Refined zones - Practical patterns for handling batch and streaming data with Kafka and Spark - Real incidents and lessons learned from production systems - Tools and technologies that work (PySpark\, Airflow\, Snowflake)

This isn't theory—it's battle-tested patterns from years of building data platforms. Whether you're designing your first data pipeline or scaling an existing platform, you'll walk away with actionable techniques you can apply immediately.

Speaker: Pradeep Kalluri Data Engineer \| NatWest \| Building Scalable Data Platforms Data Engineer with 3+ years of experience building production data platforms at NatWest, Accenture, and Capgemini. Specialized in cloud-native architectures, real-time processing with Kafka and Spark, and data quality frameworks. Published technical writer on Medium, sharing practical lessons from production systems. Passionate about making data platforms reliable and trustworthy.

• linkedin.com/in/pradeepkalluri
• medium.com/@kallurip... (blog)
• kalluripradeep.github.io (company)

Date: 2025-10-20. As your Python programs grow and become more complex, they can quickly become hard to maintain, extend and reason about. Software design patterns help keep this complexity under control, making your code more understable and facilitating the scaling to larger applications. In this workshop, we will take some bad Python code and refactor it step by step. You will learn to spot primitive obsession, replace conditionals with the Strategy pattern, and use Dependency Injection to write testable code.

The role of data analysts is evolving, not disappearing. With generative AI transforming the industry, many wonder if their analytical skills will soon become obsolete. But how is the relationship between human expertise and AI tools really changing? While AI excels at coding, debugging, and automating repetitive tasks, it struggles with understanding complex business problems and domain-specific challenges. What skills should today's data professionals focus on to remain relevant? How can you leverage AI as a partner rather than viewing it as a replacement? The balance between technical expertise and business acumen has never been more critical in navigating this changing landscape. Mo Chen is a Data & Analytics Manager with over seven years of experience in financial and banking data. Currently at NatWest Group, Mo leads initiatives that enhance data management, automate reporting, and improve decision-making across the organization. After earning an MSc in Finance & Economics from the University of St Andrews, Mo launched a career in risk and credit portfolio management before transitioning into analytics. Blending economics, finance, and data engineering, Mo is skilled at turning large-scale financial data into actionable insight that supports efficiency and strategic planning. Beyond corporate life, Mo has become a passionate educator and community-builder. On YouTube, Mo hosts a fast-growing channel (185K+ subscribers, with millions of views) where he breaks down complex analytics concepts into bite-sized, actionable lessons. In the episode, Richie and Mo explore the evolving role of data analysts, the impact of AI on coding and debugging, the importance of domain knowledge for career switchers, effective communication strategies in data analysis, and much more. Links Mentioned in the Show: Mo’s Website - Build a Data Portfolio WebsiteMo’s YouTube ChannelConnect with MoGet Certified as a Data AnalystRelated Episode: Career Skills for Data Professionals with Wes Kao, Co-Founder of MavenRewatch RADAR AI  New to DataCamp? Learn on the go using the DataCamp mobile appEmpower your business with world-class data and AI skills with DataCamp for business

Organisations adopting a Data Mesh framework often face challenges in ensuring regulatory compliance, transforming data assets into scalable products, and maintaining governance. Explore how NatWest addresses these complexities by integrating knowledge graphs with GenAI and LLMs to enhance data discovery, enforce governance policies, and accelerate product development. Learn how this approach strengthens regulatory data qualifications, automates metadata management, and delivers faster, more reliable insights— to build and scale AI-driven data products yielding a potential 10x efficiency gain.

Discover how Natwest approaches governance, security and privacy controls as well as their roadmap for building a modern data architecture.

Join this session to discover how Natwest approaches governance, security & privacy controls, focusing on how they've designed & implemented a framework that balances control with agility. We will dive into NatWest's journey to establish a robust foundation for federated governance using a hub-and-spoke model. Attendees will gain insights into how NatWest enables a scalable governance structure that empowers individual teams while maintaining centralised oversight. Additionally, NatWest will share their roadmap for building a modern data architecture, guided by Data Mesh principles, that ensures flexibility, scalability, and alignment with the evolving needs of the organisation. This session is a must-attend for those looking to modernise their data strategies with a focus on governance and architectural innovation.

PyDataMCR September Talks

Continuing to kick this year off with some more great talks we are hosted this month by Krakenflex.

THE TALKS

Unlocking climate data for SME carbon accounting - Joss Bennett **"**99% of UK businesses are SMEs, and around three-quarters are sole traders… they account for 43-53% of UK businesses’ greenhouse gas emissions in aggregate” (Source: UK Finance). Net zero presents a real challenge for SMEs in the UK, with tough an economic landscape and growing regulatory requirements which is taking the form of cascading requirements for climate disclosure originating from large multinationals down the supply-chain.

Increasing tools to automate data analysis, which overcome traditional hurdles of admin time and quality to reporting have emerged. Focusing on a spend-based assessment to identify areas for data improvement and ultimately collecting supplier-specific data will encourage action over paralysis to enable effective value-chain decarbonisation.

Joss Bennett, Sustainability, Energy and Carbon Reporting Lead for Perse.io. With 6 years of career operating across the UK sustainability landscape Joss has driven environmental campaigns with organisations such as Blake Made and Treeapp, respectively. This cumulated in a founding associates position, as the Lead Carbon Consultant, for Manchester based (UK) sustainability software start-up NetZero.co.uk.

Joss was a Senior Consultant at Green Economy, part of the social enterprise The Growth Company, implementing Greater Manchester Combined Authority’s decarbonisation targets. He has recently accepted a position at Perse.io to enable the widespread automation of utility data for systemic decarbonisation across the UK and beyond.

Rapidly Prototyping RAG applications using Local Models - Saurav Maheshkar Saurav will discuss the process of making performant RAG applications using LlamaIndex and local models. Walking through an example use-case: scraping data from the internet, creating a local embedding and LLM model, generating a vector index, and running queries. We will also discuss LLMOps best practices and create a quick UI for the application using Gradio and Hugging Face Spaces.

Saurav Maheshkar is a Machine Learning Engineer at LightlyAI (Ex: Re:course AI, Weights & Biases). He’s also a Google Developer Expert in Machine Learning and is interested in Geometric Deep Learning and Representation Learning. He’s passionate about open source and enjoys delivering talks.

Small Data - Dealing with Climate uncertainty - Josh Hayes

Climate change is impacting everyone, and business activities are one of the primary sources of emissions, financial institutions need to take responsibility for their share of these emissions.

The Taskforce for Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) have set regulatory requirements for financial institutions to disclose their financed emissions. The requirements for disclosures is tricky, as lenders need to understand their customers' emissions. As many businesses do not disclose their own emissions, a range of methodologies must be used.

Josh will explore the data challenges faced by financial institutions, provide an explanation of the standard methodologies used to estimate finances emissions, and introduce the idea of data quality scores, a metric that can be used to indicate the quality of an emissions estimate in lieu of a quantified confidence interval.

Josh has a PhD in astrophysics from the University of Manchester in 2021, where he was using Bayesian modelling to explore exoplanetary atmospheres. After completing his thesis, he worked at NatWest, where he has been the technical lead behind the calculation of the bank's emissions. He is leading research streams into significant methodological improvements, whilst supporting on multiple additional climate initiatives.

LOCATION We'll be at Krakenflex, who are also kindly supplying catering. The capacity is limited to 90.

After the talks we'll all head somewhere local for some post-event socialising.

EVENT GUIDELINES PyDataMCR is a strictly professional event, as such professional behaviour is expected.

PyDataMCR is a chapter of PyData, an educational program of NumFOCUS and thus abides by the NumFOCUS Code of Conduct

https://pydata.org/code-of-conduct.html

Please take a moment to familiarise yourself with its contents.

ACCESSIBILITY Under 16s welcome with a responsible guardian. There is a quiet room available if needed. Toilets are accessible!

SPONSORS Thank you to NUMFocus for sponsoring Meetup and further support Thank you to AutoTrader for sponsoring PyDataMCR. Thank you to Krakenflex for sponsoring PyDataMCR, as well as hosting this event!

The Ultimate Software Craftsman

L'arrivée de l'intelligence artificielle et des agents autonomes bouleverse l'ingénierie logicielle telle que nous la connaissions jusqu'ici. Au-delà de la hype, l’ambition de ce talk est de révéler l’impact de ces technologies sur le métier de software engineer. À travers des analyses critiques, des benchmarks rigoureux et des démonstrations en temps réel, nous ferons le tri entre les véritables innovations et les simples effets de mode.

Ce talk est une invitation à repenser notre manière de concevoir le développement logiciel. Préparez-vous à une discussion qui pousse les frontières de la tradition et redéfinit les rôles de l’homme et de la machine dans l'ingénierie du software.

🗣️ À propos des speakers 🎤

⚡ Wassel Alazhar est consultant, architecte et développeur. Il aide ses clients à définir leurs stratégies technologiques, concevoir des systèmes d’information adaptés et constituer des équipes qui livrent du logiciel en continu. Il les aide à le faire en faisant avec eux.

⚡ Naji Alazhar est un analyste quantitatif à NatWest Markets. Il conçoit et développe des modèles pour le pricing et la couverture d'instruments financiers.

ℹ️ Infos pratique

• Ce meetup #12 se tiendra dans les locaux d'OCTO Technology au 34 Avenue de l'Opéra Paris 2e
• ⚠️ Le nombre de places est limité, seules les personnes inscrites à ce meetup pourront pénétrer dans les locaux d'OCTO Technology
• ℹ️ Les inscriptions seront closes la veille à 12h30 🕧

Join us at the Daemon Clubhouse on June 13th for an evening of talks, food, and conversation with ML and AI industry pros.

Please note you will be unable to enter the venue before 6.30pm.

RSVPs will close 24 hours before the event, you will be unable to register after this time but you can still watch online.

If you can't join us in person you can watch remotely via our YouTube channel.

Agenda

06:30pm - Doors open, food and drink served

07:00pm - Welcome

07:05pm - An opening statement from Daemon

07:10pm - Konrad Bachusz, Lead Data Engineer at Credera, "State of AI in 2024"

Konrad Bachusz has a broad range of experience in finance and data, working in various industries including accounting, government, trading, healthcare, transportation, finance, and consulting. Currently, he is a Lead Data Engineer at a global boutique consultancy called Credera. His current role involves helping enterprise clients deliver data engineering, data platforms, and AI solutions. Konrad's interest in AI stems from his background in data analytics, data science, machine learning and data engineering. Outside of work he enjoys travelling, playing his guitars and programming.

07:50pm - Break

08:00 - Lucy Thomas ML Engineer at the Natwest Group and Dr. Ariadna Blanca Romero Senior Data Scientist / AI-Machine Learning Engineer at the Natwest Group, "Enterprise Scale MLOps at NatWest"

Lucy and Ariadna will take us on NatWest Group's journey of building an MLOps platform that streamlines the entire machine learning lifecycle, and examples of using additional tools to support MLOps. This platform has boosted team productivity, reduced manual workflows for building, training, and deploying models, and enhanced security and compliance.

Lucy Thomas is a Senior AI/ML Engineer at NatWest Group, working in the Data Innovation team. Her focus at the moment is building ML solutions for conversational intelligence that are reliable and robust. Outside of work she enjoys going to the gym, swimming in the sea and reading.

Dr. Ariadna Blanca Romero is a Senior Data Scientist/AI-ML Engineer at NatWest with a background in computational material science. She is passionate about creating tools for automation that take advantage of the reproducibility of results from models and optimize the process to ensure prompt decision-making to deliver the best customer experience. Ariadna volunteers as a STEM virtual mentor for a non-profit organization helping the professional development of Latin-American students and young professionals, particularly for empowering women. She is passionate about practising yoga, cooking, and playing her electric guitar.

09:00pm - Wrap up, drinks at The Bear

Our hosts require that we provide a list of all attendees, please ensure that you register with a name that matches your government issued ID or bank card: if you do not we cannot guarantee you entry to the building.

Please RSVP for the event well in advance if you plan to attend in person and unRSVP if you can no longer attend as limited spaces are available.

PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS IN-PERSON EVENT WILL START ON WEDNESDAY, 13 SEPTEMBER, 2023, AT 6:30 PM BST (LONDON TIME) (1.30 PM EDT (NEW YORK TIME)) at G-Research offices.

This event is sponsored by G-Research (Silver Sponsor), First Derivatives plc (Bronze Sponsor) and KX, Inc. (Bronze Sponsor).

This event is hosted by G-Research, Europe's leading quantitative finance research firm: We hire the brightest minds in the world to tackle some of the biggest questions in finance. We pair this expertise with machine learning, big data, and some of the most advanced technology available to predict movements in financial markets.

Venue: G-Research, Whittington House, 19-30 Alfred Place, London, WC1E 7EA

Arrival time of 18:00 (London) and talk starts at 18:30 (London).

Seminar will last between 1 to 1.5 hours, followed by networking / food / drinks.

Please note that your Thalesians Meetup profile must include your full name in order to be admitted by the venue, G-Research (health and safety regulations). If it doesn't include it, please email it to [email protected] along with your profile name.

FULL TITLE: Alternatives to Deep Neural Networks in Finance

ABSTRACT

We develop two methods for approximating slow-to-calculate functions, and for conditional expected value calculations: the generalized stochastic sampling (gSS) and the functional tensor train (fTT) methods. We propose them as highly-performing alternatives to generic deep neural networks (DNNs) currently routinely recommended in derivatives pricing and other quantitative finance applications. The new methods not only outperform DNNs for typical financial problems but also, unlike DNNs, satisfy stringent finance requirements such as predictability and explainability.

BIOGRAPHY

Vladimir V. Piterbarg is Managing Director, Head of Quantitative Analytics and Quantitative Development at NatWest Markets and Visiting Professor in the Department of Mathematics at Imperial College London.

Previously he has served as Head of Quantitative Analytics at Rokos Family Office, Head of Quantitative Analytics at Barclays Capital, and Co-head of Quantitative Research at Bank of America.

He taught at the University of Chicago Mathematical Finance programme for a number of years and is a prolific and respected researcher in the area of interest rate modeling.

Vladimir V. Piterbarg won two Risk Magazine's Quant of the Year Awards (2006 and 2011), and holds a PhD in Mathematics (Probability Theory) from the University of Southern California. He serves as an associate editor of The Journal of Computational Finance and The Journal of Investment Strategies.

Londroid is back with our next event of Summer 2023. We look forward to seeing some familiar and new faces.

We are excited to announce the next Londroid on Tuesday 22nd August being hosted by Natwest Group.

We'll bring the usual set-up, that we all know and love. We’ll be providing an evening of talks, networking, and a surprise spread of food and drinks from the Natwest Team that’s guaranteed to be good.

Tickets:

There will be 125 tickets available for the event, but if you miss out on the chance to come, or you are not able to attend in person, we will be recording these talks and sharing them on our Youtube Channel. Keep up to date with our event recordings and community announcements through our Twitter and on our new LinkedIn Page.

Schedule:

6:00 Arrival & registration 6:15 Food, drinks and socialising 6:45 Introduction from Londroid and Natwest 7:00 Talk One - Arkadii Ivanov - Decompose your Kotlin Multiplatform project into feature modules 7:45 Talk Two - Andrey Breslav - Kotlin: a bit of history 8:30 Q&A and socialising 8:45 Head to the pub -------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------- About our hosts and sponsors

Who are Novoda ?

A Digital Product Agency, that exists to create digital good. We're an enthusiastic team of Mobile Product Engineers from all walks of life, who help Engineering Leaders (and their teams!) build great mobile software. And when called upon we help them to scale, modernise and improve their practices as we go too.