These are some things others have written, taken from my LinkedIn references. I have been lucky to work with many colleagues, including these people, about whom I could write similarly nice things.
Nick Pendar, Senior Director of Data Science at SAP
Colleague at Skytree
Nick is an excellent data scientist with an impressively broad knowledge base. I first met Nick at Skytree, where I was recommended to audit a course he had designed and was teaching some of our partners. Nick’s ability to communicate complex subjects to a varied audience of business partners, product managers, project managers, software engineers and fellow data scientists makes him uniquely qualified to lead be it at a small startup or a large enterprise. I also had the pleasure to collaborate with Nick on a few occasions, where he brought his astute observations to define the problems at hand, before he devised and executed a plan of action to reach the best results possible.
Nick is a generalist data scientist with the experience and breadth of knowledge to tackle a great variety of data science problems. At Skytree, we worked on problems from matching talents with jobs, to preventive maintenance in the oil and gas industry, to information retrieval and everything in between. You could be sure that Nick would be able to refine, define and solve any problem competently and professionally. I learned a great deal from Nick technically as well as personally, and would welcome any chance to work with him again.
Dana Parker, Head of Sales & Marketing at All My Papers
Supervisor at Skytree
I had the pleasure of working with Nick for 3 years at Skytree. Nick was a valuable resource at Skytree. Nick is not only knowledgeable on machine learning and AI algorithms & technologies, he can also work with customers to ascertain their requirements and to solve any issues that arise. In addition, Nick was our go to guy for presentations and demonstrations.
I would highly recommend Nick. I was always confident that if Nick was on a project it will be completed comprehensively with completely.
Mike Lehmann, VP Product Management, Big Data & Data Science at Oracle
Supervisor’s supervisor at Oracle
Nick was a Data Scientist on the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Data Science service team in my group responsible for building out demonstrations/samples of the service and working with our field and customers to help them bring their use cases to life within the Oracle Cloud. Nick’s role was to bridge the sometimes complex mathematical world of data scientists with the practical reality of enterprise customers trying to build and deploy predictive analytic solutions using Oracle’s machine learning/deep learning capabilities.
Nick was a solid performer helping both internal teams pre-service launch and field/customers understand the pitfalls and issues one need to deal with when rolling out real data science based solutions. His work here was invaluable guiding the engineering teams building the right kind of service capabilities as well as critical to customers who ultimately would adopt this service. Nick not only has the hands on practical skills around the domain of data science and products/services in the space but also was well respected and leveraged across my big data and data science teams for his knowledge and skills. I am very comfortable recommending Nick as a great data scientist who can bridge from the nuts and bolts of data science done in the cloud to practical deployment and usage of it at enterprise customers.
JR Gauthier, Senior Principal Product Data Scientist at Oracle
Colleague at Oracle
Nick has a thorough understanding of the data science and machine learning landscapes. I can give you one telling example of that. During his tenure at Oracle Nick gave a presentation and shared a guide on the “pitfalls” behind productionizing a machine learning model. That was perhaps the most comprehensive guide on the subject I have ever seen. Nick’s guide touched on every steps in the process, from data acquisition to feature engineering, selection, model productionization, and concept drift detection. I wished I had access to such comprehensive guide when I started as a data scientist.
Nick’s exposure to enterprise data science use cases and challenges (at Oracle, Infosys, and Skytree) make him a valuable (and honestly rare) asset to any company needing leadership and mentorship for their data science teams. At the personal level, I enjoyed working and conversing with Nick during his time at Oracle. Nick is very respectful of his coworkers and is always looking for ways to help. His guidance and insights helped the team build a better data science platform for Oracle’s customers.
Priya Samuel, VP Engineering at Dotscience
Colleague at Dotscience
Nick is methodical and systematic when it comes to work. Nick took up the role of a Data Scientist steering the direction of Product at Dotscience. Within the context of the startup, product requirements were constantly evolving and Nick brought in some much needed sanity into product direction, capturing data points were there were required and creating an information radar with a unified product roadmap.
Nick’s style of systematic work culture massively helped within a context of a global remote team, where there was little overlap in terms of timezones. Nick prioritised attending stand-ups, offline async updates on work, and captured documentation around his work, and was flexible with the odd meetings that happened early in the day / late in the day. It was a pleasure working with him at Dotscience.