JOHN HEDLUND-FAY

PERSONAL STATEMENT

Senior Software Engineer and AI Specialist with 5+ years of production experience delivering systems for high-stakes clients, including the Premier League. Holds a Master’s with Distinction in NLP, with hands-on research focused on enterprise-scale Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). Driven to build scalable, real-world AI by combining strong full-stack engineering with applied machine learning.

Anchor 2

EDUCATION

UNIVERSITY OF SHEFFIELD

September 2024-September 2025

MSc Computer Science (Speech & Natural Language Processing)
Graduated with Distinction

POST DEGREE COURSEWORK

August 2020-October 2020

Angular: Complete Guide (2020 Edition)
REST APIs with Flask and Python
Object-Oriented PHP

UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA, TWIN CITIES

BSc Computer Science (Artificial Intelligence and Big Data)

September 2015–May 2019

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY

Coursework towards my BSc degree

Summer 2016 and Summer 2017

HONG KONG UNIVERSITY OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY (HKUST)

Semester Abroad

Spring 2017

CV/RESUME

Professional Experience

SOFTWARE ENGINEER

2020-2024

Athium, Leamington Spa, UK

Wide ranging responsibilities on a time-sensitive and high-security project to provide top-level team managers and administrators of the Premier League, English Football League, and FA Women's Super League and a single-page application interfacing with a relational database of player, team, club, and venue stats.
Created reusable and extensible APIs for querying the databases and frontend tables, lists, and data visualizations, as well as forms to be JSONified and processed into backend SQL queries.
Built and delivered APIs, development tools, documentation, and testing suites in a self-motivated, low-supervision environment.

XR SOFTWARE DEVELOPER

Summer 2018

Tactic, San Francisco, CA

Rapidly came up to speed on Unity-based tech stack for the creation of XR campaigns for a variety of high-profile clients, both consumer- and business-facing.
Innovated a new method of color correction to apply real-world lighting conditions while assuring adherence to brand standards across the client's entire catalogue.