PyData Manchester

Mind the Gap: From insights to accountability - Shannen Riley (She/Her)

A talk around arguably the most boring topic for a lot of professionals in data - governance and quality, but an essential part of everyone's role.

Shannen Riley is a Principal Recruitment Consultant (Data & Software) at Impactive IT. She partners with global brands across FCA regulated industries to build Data and Software teams in the UK, US & Europe.

She’s been in recruitment for 5 years, having worked in offender risk management previously. Now, she operates as a consultative partner to improve hiring processes, ED&I and data improvements/AI adoption.

With an academic background across statistics, data analysis, psychology & criminology, she works to breakdown the stereotype around recruitment by pushing for positive change and accountability in our industry.

From Reactive to Resilient: Using AI/ML to Build Self-Healing Deployment Pipelines - Faith Sodipe (He/Him)

Modern engineering teams spend too much time reacting, firefighting failed deployments, debugging unstable releases, and managing avoidable incidents. But what if our systems could detect, respond, and recover automatically?
In this talk, we’ll explore how AI/ML can transform traditional CI/CD pipelines into self-healing systems that proactively detect anomalies, predict failures, and trigger intelligent remediation. Rather than adding complexity, we’ll focus on practical, production-ready patterns using cloud-native tooling and ML-driven monitoring to improve reliability without over-engineering.
Beyond the technical architecture, we’ll examine the human impact: reducing operational burnout, improving release confidence, and enabling teams to build sustainably at scale.

Attendees will leave with:
1. A clear mental model of self-healing systems
2. Real-world design patterns for AI/ML-assisted reliability
3. Practical guidance for implementing resilience in modern cloud environments
Because resilience isn’t just about uptime, it’s about building systems that support the people behind them.

Faith is a software engineer with over 5 years of experience building scalable, high-impact systems across fintech and cloud environments. His work spans backend engineering with .NET and C#, as well as cross-platform development with Flutter. With a strong interest in system design, AI-driven architectures, and reliability engineering, he focuses on building resilient, production-ready systems.

Beyond his professional work, Faith is an active contributor to the tech community, mentoring early-career developers, speaking at events, and supporting initiatives that improve access and diversity in technology

LOCATION
We'll be at Autotrader, who are also kindly supplying catering. The capacity is limited to 50.
After the talks we'll all head somewhere local for some post-event socialising.

EVENT GUIDELINES
PyDataMCR is a strictly professional event, as such professional behaviour is expected.
PyDataMCR is a chapter of PyData, an educational program of NumFOCUS and thus abides by the NumFOCUS Code of Conduct: see https://pydata.org/code-of-conduct.html
Please take a moment to familiarise yourself with its contents.

ACCESSIBILITY
Toilets and venue are accessible.

SPONSORS
Thank you to NUMFocus for sponsoring Meetup and further support.
Thank you to Autotrader, Krakenflex and Horsefly Analytics for their ongoing support and sponsorship of PyDataMCR.