Josh Atwal

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josh.atwal@outlook.com

About me

Welcome to my website! My name is Josh, I’m a data scientist and software developer currently working at AWS.

My current role finds supporting AWS customers using SageMaker and Bedrock to do anything from training and deploying ML models to building custom LLM agents.

Prior to this, I obtained a Masters degree in data science and spent a few years at a YC startup.

Since I first began working in industry 8 years ago, I’ve found myself in entirely unfamiliar situations and been able to rise to the challenge every single time! For my next role, I’m looking to continue learning and challenging myself, and am particularly keen on roles that involve data science, AI, and building software.

In my spare time I frantically keep up with the latest developments in AI and enjoy reading about technology, psychology, and philosophy. See the bottom of this page for some examples of technical projects I’ve worked on in my own time.

I also have far too many hobbies; asides from the usual hiking and bouldering I am currently training for my first half-marathon, and DJ + produce electronic music.


Resumé / CV

Below is my CV. Also available as a pdf.


Work History

Cloud Support Engineer II (Big Data, AI / ML) - Amazon Web Services

January 2024 – Present

I’m currently working at AWS as a Cloud Support Engineer. I support AWS customers using the Machine Learning services: SageMaker, Bedrock, Forecast, Personalize, Textract, etc.

My main role responsibilities are to handle support cases from customers; given the nature of the services I am supporting this involves troubleshooting things like SageMaker training jobs/endpoints/pipelines, and Bedrock Knowledge Bases/Agents. This requires extensive knowledge about a wide range of topics: MLOps and the entire model lifecycle, LLMs, prompting.

Beyond case-work, I’ve also been involved in delivering training to other engineers, conducting interviews, formal mentoring, and project work. For example, I’m currently working on developing LLM agents for handling support cases and answer customer queries before a support agent even gets involved.

Skills: MLOps and ML lifecycle, LLM agents, software development, customer support


Founding Engineer - CoffeeAI (Segna)

November 2021 – September 2023 (1 year 11 months)

I was part of the founding team of a Saas startup company. I followed the company through the prestigious Y-Combinator accelerator program and learnt best practice on how to build a successful startup, achieve product market fit, raise funds, and grow a company.

My main role was as a backend Python developer, but I covered many different roles and responsibilities across multiple different product pivots and iterations:

Overall, I was relied upon to reliably be able to solve difficult engineering problems. I worked both independently and as part of a development team and managed interns. I was an invaluable member of a small team and really enjoyed having a direct impact on the direction and success of the company.

Skills: running a startup, backend software development and architecture, database design and administration, cloud deployment and devops, prompt engineering


Masters Student - Luma Analytics

July 2021 – November 2021 (5 month dissertation)

For my Masters dissertation I worked with a data analytics company. I used data to improve the analytics and insights available for amateur golfers, and uncover trends in the sport at large. This involved PCA, clustering, data visualisation, web scraping.

The work was highly exploratory and consisted of self-directed research in an unfamiliar field with only low-touch supervision.

I received an A+ grade and my work was highly valuable to Luma. It went on to be continued by another student the following year. You can view my dissertation here.

Skills: principal component analysis, clustering, data visualisation, web scraping, technical writing


Computer Vision Engineer - Beca

November 2020 – February 2021 (4 month internship)

I worked in a team to develop an end-to-end computer vision solution encompassing data labelling, model training, and prediction validation. I researched contemporary computer vision models before implementing Faster-RCNN and YOLOv5 in PyTorch, tuning them to the dataset, and comparing their performance.

For this role I acted as Product Owner and team leader of a group of three interns. The project had minimal supervision—we met with our supervisors once per week and were responsible for coming up with a sprint goal each week and delivering it. As team leader I oversaw planning and delegation of tasks, while also being heavily involved in the technical work.

Skills: computer vision, agile software development, dataset curation and labelling


Research Assistant - Auckland Bioengineering Institute

May 2017 – June 2019 (2 years)

I worked at a world-leading research institute as an assistant to Dr. Jichao Zhao using computational modelling to research atrial fibrillation.

I was responsible for running computational experiments on an HPC cluster, interpreting, and presenting the results.

I am included as an author on the following publication: Human Atrial Fibrillation Drivers Resolved With Integrated Functional and Structural Imaging to Benefit Clinical Mapping Free Access

I also completed my Honours thesis under Dr. Zhao, where I used signal processing, CNNs, and RNNs to detect atrial fibrillation from ECG signals.

Skills: high performance computing, data visualisation, signal processing, convolutional and recurrent neural networks


Software Engineer - Seequent

November 2018 – February 2019 (4 month internship)

Skills: Front-end software development using React, software development


Education

Master of Data Science

You can view my dissertation here.

Bachelor of Engineering (Honours) + Bachelor of Science conjoint degree


Personal projects

Here you can find projects I’ve undertaken outside of work.

Viral video generator

Using Stable Diffusion Ultra, Claude, and SageMaker to autonomously generate and render “viral” short form videos.

(Page under construction)


AI Generated Spotify Playlist Art

Using GPT-4 and Stable Diffusion XL to generate Spotify playlist art.

Playlist Art


Artificially Generating a LinkedIn Profile Picture

Custom training Stable Diffusion to recognise my face and generate a profile picture for LinkedIn.

AI Generated LinkedIn Profile Pictures


Facial Expression Analysis

Exploratory data analysis on a self-constructed dataset of my own facial expressions.

Facial Expression Analysis


Instagram Follower Engagement

Tracking the engagement of my Instagram followers.

Instagram Follower Engagement


Improving Analytics in Golf

A collection of projects with the aim of improving on the analytics and insight available to golfers.

Golf Clustering