Piotr Żak
Lead Data Scientist
An Oxford-trained physicist and generalist data scientist: across 13 years I have owned the full data science process – discovery, architecture, modelling, deployment and handover – from forecasting and predictive maintenance to agentic GenAI (multi-agent systems, RAG, MCP). I lead both the teams that build these systems and the stakeholder conversations that shape them.
Selected Professional Experience
SoftServe
Remote, Poland
Lead Data Scientist
Jun 2024 – Present
- Led a GenAI document-intelligence platform development for a global pharmaceutical manufacturer, resolving requirements extracted from technical PDFs against engineering diagrams.
- Led a GenAI negotiation-support platform for a TOP3 global management consultancy, leading 15 engineers to ship 36 screens and 4 use cases in 15 weeks.
- Built a GenAI application turning user input into PRDs, epics and tasks via agents and MCP tools; owned the RAG system and agentic workflow.
- Modelled the probability of oil-rig component failure from unstructured failure reports for a Norwegian offshore oil and gas operator, building a neural network with an NLP component.
Senior Data Scientist
Aug 2023 – Jun 2024
- Lead Data Scientist on a 50+ person programme delivering predictive maintenance for one of the largest windfarms in Europe; two models in production.
- Led an international team of 5 delivering slime-level forecasting for a world-leading producer of mineral sands in Mozambique (NeuralProphet, Power BI).
Algomine
Remote, Poland
Data Scientist
Sep 2021 – Aug 2023
- Led a computer-vision project for a major Polish media agency quantifying the gap between media-portrayed and real age across professions.
- Contributed to the client's open-source ML algorithm used to detect racial bias in credit-scoring models, training on ~2 TB of data.
- Built a propensity-to-buy model for the corporate division of a large Polish bank, owning it from sales process to handover.
- Built demand forecasting across 200 SKUs and 30 distribution channels for a leading Polish pharmaceutical manufacturer.
Santander Bank Polska
Warsaw, Poland
Product Owner, Analytical CRM / Data Scientist
Jun 2020 – Jul 2021
- Designed the bank's proprietary analytical CRM and led the 10–20 person team implementing it; rolled out 30+ sales campaigns.
The Boston Consulting Group
Warsaw, Poland / Glasgow, UK
Associate
Dec 2016 – Nov 2017
PKP Intercity
Warsaw, Poland
Adviser to the CEO / Data Analyst
Aug 2014 – Apr 2016
Macquarie Group
London, UK
M&A Intern
Jun 2013 – Aug 2013
Education
Warsaw University of Technology
Oct 2019 – Jun 2020
Postgraduate Studies – Data Science
University of Oxford
Oct 2011 – Jun 2014
BA Physics, St John's College – Final grade: 2:1
Warsaw, Poland / Remote
Polish (native), English (fluent)
Technologies
Machine learning
XGBoost, LightGBM, neural nets
scikit-learn
PyTorch
Optuna
SHAP
A/B testing
MLOps
Model monitoring / drift
GenAI / NLP
OpenAI Agents SDK
LangChain / LangGraph
RAG / MCP
Hugging Face Transformers
Embeddings
Vector databases (e.g. Redis)
Prompting / guardrails
FastAPI / Pydantic
Engineering
Python (incl. OOP)
SQL
PySpark
Databricks
Docker
Cloud
CI/CD
MLflow / Azure ML
Pipeline orchestration
Power BI
Interests
TOP110 squash player in Poland
Passionate kite-surfer
Snowboarding instructor