Ali Cigari

For the love of the cycling, coffee and coding

Hi there!

I am a product focused engineer at heart, who loves to learn and be hands on. I value ownership, kindness and intellectual honesty.

I am a manager and individual contributor working at the intersection of software engineering, quantitative analysis and data science. I have years of experience building creative solutions to problems across varying domains including finance, sports science and logistics. I am passionate about building strong engineering teams and enabling others to reach their full potential.

I am currently a software engineer in the DS&T team at Castleton Commodities. Previous to that, I was the Head of Engineering and Data Science at Waybridge, where we were using technology to bring efficiencies to the supply chain network world. Waybridge was acquired by Minehub in 2023.

Before Waybridge, I was working on Wattson Blue, where I continue to hack away and fix bugs every time Apple or Google decide to break their old APIs :). We actually won funding from University of Oxford IT Innovations to start the project, and I raised further funding from Angels down the line. Wattson Blue is still being used by athletes every day.

Prior to that, I used to work at Goldman Sachs as an Executive Director in Commodities Strategies, before I decided to quit to do a DPhil in Computational Biology, focused on Oncology.

In addition to my PhD, I have an MA from University of Cambridge in Mathematics and an MSc in Mathematical Modelling and Scientific Computing from University of Oxford. Despite all the degrees I have accidentally gathered over the years, I love moving fast and getting things done!

Please get in touch to say hi.

Latest stories

Sorry - why isn't everyone using Polars now? Pandas is synonymous with data science. I used to work more in the data space, I was Head of Data Science at Waybridge and did a ton of data science in my own startup Wattson Blue. However, more recently I have been doing more software engineering; as such I have not actively been looking at what is the most performant way of playing with data (since…

Keep Reading →

The Challenge of Hiring Software Engineers As I've been conducting interviews for software engineering positions across various teams in my company, I've observed a concerning pattern: many candidates lack the fundamental skills required for our team. Common Interview Challenges Key issues I've encountered include: Python developers struggling with core language concepts and problem-solving Mid to…

Keep Reading →

I had a couple of hours to spare this morning and I thought it would be fun to do something productive. OK, maybe not productive, but something that might make me feel productive. I had seen people on Twitter claiming to build a proof of concept they had within a few hours with the help of ChatGPT, so I decided to test it out for myself. Wondering a little bit about what I could build, I…

Keep Reading →

A few weeks with Dagster I have recently been setting up my first ML Ops infrastructure. The space is a bit of a minefield, with so many components including data pipeline tools, feature stores, model registries, model serving tools, data monitoring and more. 🤯 You have to start somewhere and after doing a bit of thinking and planning, I decided starting with a solid data pipeline tool would be a…

Keep Reading →

Realtive imports in python I sometimes prioritize delivery speed in my work and may overlook certain concepts that I can work around. One such concept is relative imports in python. I am certainly not the first developer to encounter the following error when executing a random Python script: So here is my attempt to explain to myself what is going on. Difference between a package and a module Let…

Keep Reading →

Simply follow the steps below: Decide on a company that you are considering working for. Start a browser in incognito/private mode. Go to the said company's website. View their "Cookie Banner", and select the option that best describes the mess that's their "Cookie Banner": There is a simple "Accept" and/or "Deny/Accept only essential" option. The UI is designed to lead you to tap "Accept all…

Keep Reading →

I am sure someone has done this already but if not.... Right here we go again. The results are a complete mess this year - I think because of the weather a lot of people cutting out parts of the ride and so on. Using the last 6 mile speed as a guide - looks like Oliver Richardson won men's (wasn't he supposed to be a ride captain 🙈) and Jenny Corser won the women? 💪💪 Google sheet Francis Jago…

Keep Reading →

Excited to announce that we are developing ‘Oxford Restfulness and Readiness Tracker’, a platform to help optimise student athletes maximise their performance and minimise mental health issues. We have recently been awarded funding from the IT Innovations Challenge and will be working with the athletes and coaches in OUBC and OUWBC over the next Boat Race season to develop the product. We really…

Keep Reading →

I have again sorted the results by time and so on. There is a second tab just for women. I have put them on a google spreadsheet this year. The top 200 results are listed below. In total 70 people broke the magical 25 mph average speed, although most starva uploads calculated a route that was a mile or two short of 100. I personally struggled on the hills given how much upper body weight and fat I…

Keep Reading →

random rowing picture from my time at Univ I had a 5k test on the rowing machines in the gym today. I did one a couple of months back and it went really well. It was a 20s PB, and I just smashed it. Today, was a different story. I had come in with some injuries over the past few weeks and my preparation had been less than ideal. I had a bit of a sore throat that was also playing on my mind, but…

Keep Reading →

cricket at Oxford Watching England beat the Australian's in the Ashes (in particular at Trent Bridge this week) is pure joy, pure pleasure. I am just watching the highlights of day 1 at Trent Bridge (SPOILER: with Australia all out for 60 in the first innings), and well, I am just sitting here, grinning. It's a weird game cricket, it can be painful watching it (or listening on TMS), when your team…

Keep Reading →

As a programming language, MATLAB is not my favourite. Yes, you can prototype things in it quickly, but when people start building libraries that then others build more libraries on, you end up getting stuck in it. If you are not sucked into it yet, don't. Please. Save yourself. Here are a couple of reasons why it is a poor choice to do any proper development in (and these are simple (or petty…

Keep Reading →

Wnt Pathway Experiments I am looking at the Wnt signalling pathway in my research, which is altered in some cancers. Last week, my supervisor gave me two of the latest papers in the field to look at. I haven't read them in detail yet but below are two sentences from the papers: ... we provide the formal demonstration that APC is necessary for β-catenin phosphorylation ... (Lili Wang, 2014) ... our…

Keep Reading →

I manage all my emails from my Gmail. I have way too many mail boxes. I have to be able to manage all of these from one inbox, otherwise I will go crazy. More importantly though, I want to be able to have a copy of all my Oxford emails once I leave Oxford. The write up below describes how you can get all your Oxford emails in Gmail and then also reply and manage them from there, without anyone…

Keep Reading →

Due to popular demand, here are all the Men and Women results for the Prudential Surrey 100 mile Ride that took place on Sunday August 4th in and around London. There are clearly some mistakes in there (such as Phils and Nigels on the women's list), but they are all directly from the Organisers website. They of course have all the rights to these results. Give a shoutout to me if you do use them…

Keep Reading →