Shaan Aucharagram

Data Science Degree Apprentice

Santander UK

About Me

I’m a Data Science Degree Apprentice at Santander UK, technology enthusiast and youth activist with a strong interest for the financial markets.

I started my career with my heart set out on technology, helping out Suneeta Cosmetics Ltd, my family business, in running the technical side of the business. This was primarily through creating the website and improving customer retention. I was also involved in collaborating with other companies, and attended various events and was invited to the HQ of ASOS all whilst completing my A-Levels.

After turning down university, I decided to pursue a degree apprenticeship within Data Science at Santander UK concurrently studying a BSc (Hons) in Data Science from NTU. Recently, I have been involved in a variety of public speaking events and have had the privilege to promote apprenticeships as an ambassador for Whitehat and LYAAN.

So far, I have been involved in a variety of projects from chatbots to customer churn. Whilst I’m not certain where the future may take me, I have learnt to embrace the uncertainty.

Interests

Data/Decision Science
Financial Markets
Machine Learning

Education

Level 4 in Data Analytics, 2019 - 2021

Whitehat
Computing (D*), Media (A), Maths (C)

Reigate Sixth Form College

Skills

% - Skill Level

Python

85%

Git

90%

R

70%

Data Visualizations

90%

SQL

85%

Machine Learning

80%

Statistics

75%

Business Acumen

90%

Stakeholder Management

85%

Skills Breakdown

Technical Skills

Python
C++
R
Relational Databases - SQL/PostgreSQL
Machine Learning - NLP, Deep Learning
Data Visualisations - Tableau, Plotly, Dash
Data Science/Data Analysis
Version Control - Git
Hadoop HDFS for Big Data Storage - Impala, Hive, hadoop
Web Development - HTML, CSS, blogdown
Package Building - I created my own python package: https://pypi.org/project/strangerqueries/

Soft Skills/Business Skills

Stakeholder Management
Public Speaking - I have spoken at various events for Whitehat and LYAAN as an ambassador for apprenticeships
Interpersonal Relationships
Networking

Interests/Hobbies

Financial Markets
Foreign Television
Film Production & Video Editing (Adobe Creative Suite)
Football, Skiing & Tennis
Vegan Food

Experience

Apprenticeship Ambassador / Leader

National Apprenticeship Services / Whitehat GB

Apr 2020 – Present London

I am an apprenticeship ambassador for Whitehat and LYAAN. I act as a role model by sharing my journey as an apprentice, as well as challenging the associated stigma of apprenticeships. This is through public speaking at events as well as creating content to encourage the younger generation to consider all their options.

Data Science Degree Apprentice

Santander UK

Sep 2019 – Present London

Rotational degree apprenticeship program with a specialism in Data Science across the retail bank and CCB/CIB, part of the first cohort.

Core Data Science Team (Sep 2019 - Jun 2020):

Creating an internal package within the bank to automate Impala and Hive queries in Cloudera, reducing overheads for the data science community (150 people).
Using NLP to optimize our chatbots to meet customer needs, in turn reducing the workload on our Agents/Retail Staff.
Liaising with various internal and external stakeholders and meeting their project needs, before presenting the Mortgage Churn Dashboard made using Python packages Plotly Dash.
Working on the time-sensitive CBILS and BBLS project using SQL, to provide the government with an overview of the bank’s transactions taken during COVID-19.

Financial Crime Analytics (Jul 2020 - Present):

The sole developer of the Duedil data remediation project, which uses APIs to retrieve the latest data from Duedil for companies and compares it to the data stored within the banks data lake and replacing where neccesary.
Liasing with various people within CIB/CCB to create a solution which can be used by other teams within the bank.

Chief Technology Officer (CTO)

Suneeta Cosmetics Ltd

Jan 2017 – Sep 2019 London

Some of my most notable achievement include:

Managing the development of the Suneeta Cosmetics website www.suneetacosmetics.co.uk and the respective CBD website www.suneetacbd.co.uk, whilst ensuring that we complied with legislation for the CBD website.
Identified where we could improve customer experience on the website, and as a result improved customer retention by 10%
Attending a variety of events and acting on the companies behalf, most notable collaboration was being invited to the HQ of ASOS.