Director of BI & Data @ Paystone

I turn data into decisions and ideas into products.

I build data-driven cultures and the products that run on them — from enterprise data lakes to AI-first transformations to the apps I ship on the side.

$70M
Fundraise — led investor KPI reporting
$1.1M
ARR opportunities uncovered
60+
Data sources unified

/ Selected work

Things I've built.

Data platforms and ML systems that move businesses, plus products I ship on my own time. Same standard either way.

Personal Product · Health + Sport

CrankFuel

In active development

A fueling and nutrition companion built for Type 1 diabetic cyclists — because I am one.

CrankFuel helps endurance cyclists who manage Type 1 Diabetes plan and execute their in-ride fueling: carbohydrate timing, insulin-on-board awareness, and glucose-aware nutrition strategies. It's the tool I always wished existed on long rides — built with safety as a first-class constraint, not an afterthought.

  • Glucose-aware carb and fueling planning for endurance efforts
  • Safety-first design — conservative defaults around insulin and lows
  • Born from the intersection of two things I live: cycling and T1D
React NativeTypeScriptNode.jsAI/ML

Client Product · Web Platform

Nicola Circelli Law

Shipped

A complete refactor and modern rebuild of a law firm's web presence.

A ground-up rebuild of the Nicola Circelli Law website — modern, fast, and maintainable. Designed and shipped on a disciplined workflow: feature branches, pull requests, preview deploys, and a clean handoff. Proof that good engineering hygiene applies whether you're shipping to one client or millions.

  • Full refactor to a modern, performant stack
  • Branch → PR → preview-deploy → merge workflow throughout
  • Backed by Supabase, deployed on Vercel
Next.jsTailwind CSSSupabaseVercel

Professional · Data Platform

Databricks Lakehouse

Production

A unified lakehouse combining 60+ sources into one source of truth.

I architected Paystone's data foundation — originally a data lake on AWS S3 and Redshift unifying 60+ disparate sources, then consolidated into a Databricks Lakehouse for near real-time streaming and a far stronger MLOps experience. One governed platform that every downstream model, dashboard, and AI agent now runs on.

  • 60+ data sources unified into one governed platform
  • Consolidated onto a Databricks Lakehouse for near real-time streaming & MLOps
  • Unified data and KPIs across the entire organization
  • The foundation every model, dashboard, and agent is built on
DatabricksDelta LakeApache SparkAWS S3RedshiftSQL

Professional · Conversational AI

Genie Conversational AI

Production

Ask the data questions in plain English — no SQL, no waiting on an analyst.

Deployed Databricks Genie on top of the lakehouse to put a natural-language interface on company data. Teams ask questions conversationally and get governed answers back in seconds — self-serve insight at the speed of a sentence, instead of a dashboard request and a two-day wait.

  • Natural-language querying over the Databricks Lakehouse
  • Self-serve answers without writing SQL or waiting on analysts
  • Conversational AI brought to everyday business decisions
DatabricksGenieUnity CatalogLLMsSQL

Professional · Agentic AI

Agentic AI Frameworks

Production

Production AI agents — from pre-sales research to RAG-powered support.

Designer and builder of Paystone's agentic AI frameworks, with two agents in production. A pre-sales research agent profiles a prospect end-to-end before every call, saving reps roughly an hour each. A technical knowledge-base agent does retrieval over Databricks Vector Search (RAG) and is served flexibly — via MCP, a Databricks App, or directly inside Salesforce chat.

  • Pre-sales research agent — full prospect discovery, ~1 hour saved per call
  • Technical knowledge-base retrieval (RAG) on Databricks Vector Search
  • Served anywhere: MCP, a Databricks App, or Salesforce chat
  • Core to Paystone's AI-first transformation
Databricks Vector SearchRAGMCPLLMsSalesforcePython

Professional · Machine Learning

Google Review Propensity Model

Production

An XGBoost model predicting which customers are likely to leave a Google review.

Built a gradient-boosted (XGBoost) model that scores each customer's probability of leaving a Google review. It lets the business concentrate review-generation effort exactly where it's most likely to convert — turning behavioral signals into measurable online-reputation growth.

  • XGBoost model scoring review-likelihood per customer
  • Focuses review-generation effort where it actually converts
  • Turns behavioral signals into reputation growth
PythonXGBoostScikit-LearnPandasDatabricks

Professional · BI & Reporting

Looker Deployment

Production

One reporting layer to consolidate every metric across the company.

Rolled out Looker as Paystone's company-wide reporting standard — consolidating metrics that had been scattered across tools and teams into one governed layer. A single, trusted definition of every KPI, consistent across the whole organization.

  • Company-wide reporting standard on Looker
  • Consolidated metrics across every team into one layer
  • Governed, consistent KPI definitions org-wide
LookerLookMLDatabricksBigQuerySQL

Professional · Internal Tooling

AI Resume Screening Tool

Internal

An internal tool that saves hours of manual candidate screening.

Built an internal resume-screening tool to take the grind out of shortlisting candidates — saving the hiring team hours per role while keeping a human in the loop for the decisions that matter. A small, practical example of pointing ML at the boring problems.

  • Automated first-pass candidate screening
  • Hours saved per role, human-in-the-loop by design
  • Practical ML applied to real operational friction
PythonScikit-LearnPandasNLP

/ Career

The path so far.

A decade of turning analytics into strategy — and increasingly, into shipped product.

May 2021 — Present

Paystone

Director of BI & Data

Current

Insights & Analytics Division

  • Led KPI compilation and investor-facing reporting through the company's $70M fundraise — owning the data investors evaluated and fielding their questions directly. The raise led to the acquisition of NiceJob.
  • Lead a team of 6 — data engineers, analysts, and scientists — organized into domain-based, full-stack pods.
  • Uncovered $1.1M in ARR opportunities within COGS.
  • Deployed Databricks to consolidate data engineering pipelines, enabling near real-time streaming and a stronger MLOps experience.
  • Deployed Looker as the internal reporting tool and FormaAI for residuals and compensation payouts.
  • Unified data and KPIs across the organization and companies onto one platform.
  • Built a culture of idea-based meritocracy — zero attrition since the team's inception.
  • Leading Paystone's AI-first transformation.

Aug 2019 — May 2021

Paystone

Insights & Analytics Manager

Insights & Analytics Division

  • Built Paystone's data lake on AWS S3 and Redshift, combining 60+ data sources.
  • Built a neural network for early detection of customer churn.
  • Built intuitive dashboards and visualizations to help the business grow.
  • Built a data-driven culture — moving the org from "I think" to "I know".
  • Acted as a consultant to the business, helping shape successful strategies.
  • Built a resume-screening tool to save hours selecting candidates.

May 2018 — Aug 2019

3M

Marketing Manager

Industrial & Safety Markets

  • Owned the strategy for the industrial and safety verticals.
  • Led the cross-selling initiative to drive cross-division engagement.
  • Created the One 3M Sales Guide to enable distributor reps to sell more 3M.

Oct 2014 — May 2018

3M

Product Owner

Business Insights & Analytics

  • Product Owner for the B2B team, leading and setting the strategy for success.
  • Coached 3M Korea, 3M Brasil, and 3M Sweden on analytics best practices to replicate Canadian success.

/ Toolkit

From model weights to managing people.

Full-stack range — comfortable in a notebook, a data warehouse, a React codebase, and a 1:1.

Data & ML

PythonTensorFlowScikit-LearnPandasNumPyApache SparkDatabricksBig Data

Data Platform & BI

AWSGCPRedshiftSQLLookerPower BIExcelSalesforce

Engineering

TypeScriptJavaScriptReact.jsNode.jsExpress.jsMongoDBMongooseAPIsHTML / CSSGit

Leadership

People ManagementCoachingStrategyConsultingScrumBuilding TrustCommunication

/ About

Data leader. Relentless builder.

I'm a data and BI leader who never stopped being a builder. By day I lead Business Intelligence & Data at Paystone, where I've grown a domain-based, full-stack team and steered the company's AI-first transformation. I led the KPI reporting that anchored our $70M fundraise — the data investors leaned on, and the questions I answered — which led to the acquisition of NiceJob.

But I don't just present numbers — I ship. I've built data lakes from sixty-plus sources, trained neural networks to catch customer churn before it happens, and on nights and weekends I build full products: a nutrition app for Type 1 diabetic cyclists, a modern web platform for a law firm, and whatever problem is bugging me next.

My north star is simple: move organizations from "I think" to "I know" — and make the experience of getting there genuinely delightful.

⛷️

Ski Racing

Racing with the London Ski Club (LSC).

🚴

Endurance Cycling

Team member with ESP Cycling — and the reason CrankFuel exists.

🤝

Board Service

Former Vice Chair, Family Service Thames Valley (2019 — 2021).

🌍

Trilingual

Fluent in English, French, and Arabic.

Education

  • M.Sc.Econ., International Finance

    University of Galway, Ireland

    2013 — 2014

  • H.Dip. in Economics

    University of Galway, Ireland

    2012 — 2013

  • B.S. in Economics

    Lebanese American University

    2009 — 2012

Certifications & Accreditations

Academy Accreditation — AI Agent Fundamentals

Databricks · Feb 2026

Academy Accreditation — Databricks Lakehouse Fundamentals

Databricks · Nov 2022 — Nov 2023

Databricks Lakehouse Fundamentals

Databricks · Nov 2022 — Nov 2023

The Complete 2022 Web Development Bootcamp

Udemy · Aug 2022

JavaScript (Basic)

HackerRank

SQL (Advanced)

HackerRank · Apr 2022

SQL (Intermediate)

HackerRank · Apr 2022

SQL (Basic)

HackerRank · Apr 2022

Python for Data Science & Machine Learning Bootcamp

Udemy · Dec 2020

Certified Scrum Product Owner

Scrum Alliance · Sep 2017 — Sep 2019

/ Contact

Let's build something.

Whether it's a data problem worth solving, a product worth shipping, or just a good conversation — my inbox is open.

Say hello