ML Specialist/Data Engineer with Research Experience

I'm an ML specialist with both development and research experience, backed by a strong generalist engineering background. I have six (or 16, depending on how you count) years of professional experience including a FAANG research lab with resulting publications and patents, as well as an alpha quant research role in a systematic hedge fund, from the data pipelines to final modeling. Since then I've been an independent consultant. My latest engagement has included working with an HR tech startup to help their customers make sense a torrent of free-form text feedback generated by their clients' employees by creating a custom clustering algorithm and integrating it with their systems. I'm passionate about generating business value from data, be that directly by making revenue impacting predictions, or by creating features your clients want. At the same time I'm highly curious and can target anywhere on the spectrum from basic research to getting something useful running quickly, depending on your needs. At present, I'm looking for contract work, long-term and high-time commitment is possible.