Fahad Akbar — Data Science Leader, ML Practitioner, Thought Partner

Data science leader with 15+ years of experience and 36+ delivered projects across forecasting, pricing and elasticity, generative AI and large language models, causal inference, customer segmentation, voice AI, and geospatial analytics. Currently Senior Manager, Data Science at Bain & Company, and founding member and core contributor of PyCaret, the open-source low-code machine learning library.

What I do

I build high-impact AI and analytics solutions end-to-end — from problem framing with stakeholders through modeling, deployment, and measurement. My toolkit covers Python, SQL, PySpark, cloud MLOps, Tableau, Power BI, and Alteryx, applied to predictive modeling, Gen AI and retrieval-augmented generation, human-in-the-loop systems, and experimentation.

Experience

• Senior Manager, Data Science — Bain & Company (Sep 2022 – present)
• Founding Member & Core Contributor — PyCaret (Jun 2019 – present)
• Mentor — MIT Professional Education
• Adjunct Instructor — Smith School of Business, Queen's University
• Prior roles at Loblaw, Canopy Growth, the Government of Ontario, TD Bank, and Xplornet

Selected work

24 impact projects across seven categories: generative AI and LLMs, pricing and elasticity, customer segmentation, voice AI, analytics, geospatial, and data engineering. Highlights include large-scale demand forecasting with Ray and PyCaret, category-level price elasticity modeling, LCA-based customer segmentation, decile- targeted lead scoring, voice cloning pipelines, and NLP review analytics on unstructured customer feedback.

Open-source work

• PyCaret — low-code machine learning library (contributor and co-author)
• SparkAutoML — PySpark MLlib automation wrapper
• Preprocess1 — 20+ data preprocessing techniques for ML pipelines (contributor and co-author)
• Sparkify — end-to-end churn prediction on big data

Credentials

MBA from the Smith School of Business, Queen's University (3.82 GPA). Master's degree (3.76 GPA) and Bachelor's degree (3.46 GPA). Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) Level III.

Writing & contact

I publish on data science at Towards Data Science on Medium. Connect on LinkedIn, see open-source work on GitHub, or email fahadakbar@gmail.com. Download my CV (PDF).