Australia

Scott Yip

Data Scientist & Software Engineer building production GenAI and ML systems

7M
App customers reached
3
Production systems shipped
Dux
Master of Data Science
3
Cities worked in
Melbourne · Auckland · SF

From balance sheets to machine learning

In 2019, after a long day of spreadsheets, I came across a Medium article on neural networks. After staring at it for far too long, dazzled and confused, I decided to retrain in data science. I went on to graduate dux of my Monash Master's, and now build production GenAI and machine learning systems at Commonwealth Bank.

My consulting background still shapes how I work: I combine commercial acumen and a feel for what actually moves the business with hands-on technical depth, working in the trenches to build the systems.

What I enjoy most is owning problems end to end, from the model to the product people actually use. Away from the screen, I'm usually coding side projects, training at the gym, travelling, getting far too into interior design, or out with my camera.

Highlights

Built CBA's first customer-facing GenAI agent
7M customers · disputes at scale
Unblocked voice agents with novel guardrails
strong F1 / AUROC · latency 1,800ms to 49ms
Forecast cashflow for business banking customers
2M customers · time-series ML in production
Shipped a frauds & scams agentic workflow
~30 min saved per case, for the fraud team
2025 CBA Excellence Awards finalist
for the customer-facing Disputes Agent

Toolbox

GenAI & Agents

  • LLMs
  • Agentic workflows
  • LangGraph
  • ADK
  • PydanticAI
  • Guardrails
  • LLM evaluation
  • Fine-tuning

Machine Learning

  • NLP
  • Classification
  • Forecasting
  • Fraud / risk
  • Embeddings
  • pgvector

Backend & Data

  • FastAPI
  • PostgreSQL
  • Redis
  • SQLAlchemy
  • SQL
  • Apache Spark
  • PySpark
  • Spark SQL
  • Database design

Infra & Observability

  • Docker
  • AWS
  • SageMaker
  • HyperPod
  • Linux
  • Vercel
  • Railway
  • Logfire

Languages

  • Python
  • SQL
  • R

Built in production

  1. Commonwealth Bank of Australia

    2023 - Present Now

    Data Scientist, GenAI

    Commonwealth Bank of Australia · Melbourne, VIC

    Building production GenAI systems across the bank — agents, guardrails, and fraud/scams workflows — with three accelerated promotions.

    • Built CBA's first customer-facing GenAI agent (disputes): live to 7M app customers at scale, and a 2025 CBA Excellence Awards finalist.
    • Materially cut dispute rework with a structured LangGraph agent workflow, reaching high intent-classification and information-extraction accuracy.
    • Shipped a frauds & scams agentic workflow used by the fraud team, synthesising multiple signals into structured case reports, saving ~30 min per case.
    • Fine-tuned streaming financial-advice guardrails, cutting latency from ~1,800ms to 49ms with strong F1 / AUROC on a binary classifier.
  2. Monash University

    Nov 2021 - Mar 2022

    Summer AI Research Assistant

    Monash University · Melbourne, VIC

    Transformer-based NLP research.

    • Prototyped a Transformer model for multi-label text classification, benchmarking encoder-decoder and BERT-based architectures across applied NLP tasks.
  3. Pitcher Partners

    Mar 2016 - Mar 2021

    Audit, Taxation & Advisory Manager

    Pitcher Partners · Melbourne · Auckland · San Francisco

    Managed audit, tax and advisory engagements (~AUD 450K p.a.) with four accelerated promotions, blending accounting with data-driven analysis.

    • Built a firm-wide AASB 16 leasing model adopted across a 400-person division.
    • Implemented a bank-transaction classification algorithm for forecasting, saving 40+ hours of manual work.
    • Revamped graduate training onto Rise360, contributing to a 6% lift in training satisfaction.

Projects

Things I've built

Culina

AI-Powered Nutrition & Macro Tracking App

  • Built and launched a production AI nutrition app with React/Vite, FastAPI, PostgreSQL, Redis and SQLAlchemy, with LLM-based food entry generated from text and photos.
  • Implemented semantic food search with pgvector nearest-neighbour retrieval, image-derived embeddings, Logfire observability, rate limiting and optimised SQL macro aggregation.
  • React
  • FastAPI
  • PostgreSQL
  • pgvector
  • Redis
Visit useculina.com →

Education

Study & credentials

Chartered Accountants Australia & New Zealand

Mar 2017 - Dec 2019

Graduate Diploma of Chartered Accounting

Chartered Accountants Australia & New Zealand

Candidate of the Module, Victoria - Taxation, 2018.

Off the clock

Through the lens

Contact

Let's build something good

Reach out if you want to talk GenAI systems, applied ML, product engineering, or photography.