Theme

02 / the person

About

I'm Sholto — a machine learning engineer in Johannesburg, South Africa. I like the unglamorous half of ML: the part after the notebook, where a model has to run every day on real data without anyone babysitting it.

That's taken me through a bank, an IoT platform, a retail analytics startup and an AI consultancy. Along the way: a rules engine executing on 7M+ transactions a day, streaming platforms chewing through a million records a minute, RAG systems that cite their sources, and computer vision pointed at shelves and branch cameras.

I've led a team of ten and I still write code every week. The best part of the job is watching someone else's workflow get faster because of something you built.

Off the clock: anime, an unreasonable amount of time spent on cats, and side projects that start as "this should take an evening".

Sholto Armstrong, machine learning engineer
Sholto Armstrong · UTC+2

Education

University of Pretoria
  1. MEng

    Master of Engineering, Computer Engineering

    University of Pretoria · 01/2020 — 12/2023

    Graduated cum laude; part-time enrolment with a research focus on scene understanding (computer vision).

  2. BEngHons

    Bachelor of Engineering Honours, Computer Engineering

    University of Pretoria · 01/2018 — 12/2019

    Graduated cum laude; part-time enrolment with a focus on artificial intelligence.

  3. BEng

    Bachelor of Engineering, Computer Engineering

    University of Pretoria · 01/2014 — 12/2017

    Graduated cum laude with a bronze merit award; silver merit awards in 2nd and 3rd year; Golden Key member.