Tom Swart
Data Engineer
I'm a data engineer specialising in ingestion pipelines, Django/PostgreSQL platforms, and scraping workflows. I build production-minded systems with proper retries, idempotent loads, clear failure modes and observability. For teams that need messy data turned into something usable. Currently the founder and lead engineer at Grocery Lens.
When I'm not writing code, I'm tinkering with homelab setups, bouldering, or testing the latest local LLM released on HuggingFace.
> skills
Core Stack
Ingestion & Scraping
Infrastructure & Ops
Visualisation
> timeline
Jul 2025 – present
Founder / Lead Data Engineer
Grocery Lens
Building a Django/PostgreSQL data product with custom dietary filters, recipe matching and NLP-assisted ingredient processing. Designed replayable ingestion workflows, privacy-aware analytics, and blue/green deployments with Grafana/Loki observability.
2023 – Jun 2025
Data Engineer
Department for Business & Trade, UK Government
Led the Data Pipeline Service team (5 engineers). Built and maintained Airflow/PostgreSQL/SQLAlchemy pipelines ingesting APIs, S3, GA4, Qualtrics and Comtrade data. Designed a TB-scale trade data pipeline with partitioned ingestion for high-volume analytics. Reduced failing pipeline backlog from 50+ to fewer than 5 in under 3 months.
2023
Data Analyst
Department for Business & Trade, UK Government
Built recursive SQL analytics and a D3.js company hierarchy visualiser deployed across the department. Improved Dun & Bradstreet matched-company coverage from ~65% to above 80%.
2022 – 2023
Junior Data Analyst
Department for Business & Trade, UK Government
Developed QuickSight BI dashboards and delivered SQL/dashboard training through in-house data bootcamps.
2019 – 2022
PhD Psychology
Goldsmiths, University of London
2016 – 2017
MSc Neuroscience
King's College London
2011 – 2014
BSc Biology
Imperial College London