# Sajid Alam

> Senior Software Engineer at QuantumBlack, AI by McKinsey, and a maintainer of Kedro, an open-source Python framework on the Linux Foundation’s LF AI & Data.

Senior Software Engineer at QuantumBlack, AI by McKinsey. Based in London, United Kingdom.
Maintainer on the Kedro Technical Steering Committee.

## At a glance

- 5 yrs — maintaining Kedro. Continuous contribution since October 2021.
- 200+ — merged pull requests. Across kedro, kedro-viz, kedro-plugins, kedro-starters, vscode-kedro and kedro-academy.
- 10.9k — stars on the framework. kedro-org/kedro, an LF AI & Data graduate project.
- 860k — downloads per month. PyPI installs of kedro.

## Open-source footprint (github.com/kedro-org)

- kedro-org/kedro — The framework itself. 86 merged PRs, 643 commits. Runner internals, the parameter validation subsystem, the `kedro new` tools flow, micropackaging, Rich logging, cloud `--conf-source`, and release engineering.
- kedro-org/kedro-plugins — Datasets & integrations. 44 merged PRs, 458 commits. SparkDatasetV2, Databricks and Spark Connect utilities, the vector-store abstraction, and the Langfuse/Opik LLM observability family.
- kedro-org/kedro-viz — The React visualisation tool. 35 merged PRs, 487 commits. Flowchart model decomposition, DataCatalog 2.0 lazy loading, modular pipeline expansion, and the Redux preferences layer.
- kedro-org/kedro-starters — Project templates. 17 merged PRs, 57 commits. The spaceflights, pyspark-iris and databricks-iris starters, including the canonical “initialise Spark via hooks” pattern.
- kedro-org/vscode-kedro — The editor extension. 9 merged PRs, 74 commits. Refactored the Python language-server validation architecture into a pluggable validator package with live catalog diagnostics.
- kedro-org/kedro-academy — Teaching material. 3 merged PRs, 2 commits. Observability provider as an environment switch, and evaluation-pipeline training content.

Releases cut personally:
- kedro: 0.17.7, 0.18.12, 0.19.2, 1.3.0, 1.3.1
- kedro-viz: 9.2.0, 10.2.0
- vscode-kedro: 0.6.0, 0.7.0

## Selected work

- [Catalog-native dataset validation](https://sajidalam.co.uk/work/kep-10-dataset-validation) (2026) — KEP-10 · Kedro Enhancement Proposal. Authored and shepherded a formal enhancement proposal through community review, a withdrawal, a redesign, and a Technical Steering Committee vote. Then built it. Outcome: Accepted by TSC vote.
- [Rewriting Kedro’s Spark dataset](https://sajidalam.co.uk/work/spark-dataset-v2) (2025) — kedro-plugins #1185. A ground-up replacement for the most load-bearing dataset in the ecosystem, adding Spark Connect support and untangling a decade of Databricks path handling. Outcome: +1,956 lines, zero breaking changes.
- [Type-hint parameter validation](https://sajidalam.co.uk/work/parameter-validation) (2026) — Shipped in Kedro 1.3.0. A validation subsystem that reads the type hints already on your node functions and turns them into runtime guarantees, delivered as six reviewable pull requests. Outcome: In every Kedro install since 1.3.0.
- [Observability for LLM pipelines](https://sajidalam.co.uk/work/llm-observability-datasets) (2025–26) — Langfuse · Opik · AutoGen. The tracing and evaluation datasets that let a Kedro pipeline emit LLM telemetry the same way it writes a Parquet file, plus an MCP server that answers questions about Kedro itself. Outcome: ~3,400 lines across two providers.

## Talks and community

- Dataset Validation is coming to Kedro — Kedro Coffee Chat, August 2026. Presenting the KEP-10 design and a live before/after demo: a supplier feed with a duplicate ID, a malformed rating and an invalid flag, caught at the I/O boundary instead of deep inside a node.
- Kedro: The Toolbox for Production-Ready Data Pipelines — GOSIM Paris 2026 · Station F, May 2026. Invited talk at the Own Your Data Science & AI Workshop, hosted by scikit-learn, Probabl and Fraunhofer IAIS.
- GraphRAG with Kedro — Kedro Coffee Chat · with Laura Couto, June 2026. On GraphRAG, agents, and the unglamorous pipeline work that makes agentic systems reproducible. The most-watched Coffee Chat of the series.
- Host, Kedro Coffee Chats — Kedro community livestream, 2026 – present. Took over hosting the community’s public technical stream: booking speakers, shaping each session, and running the broadcast. Recent episodes have covered the Data Catalog, spec-driven development, Kedro in VS Code, and evaluation pipelines with Langfuse.

## Education

- MSc Artificial Intelligence, Queen Mary University of London (2020 – 2021) — Merit. QuantumBlack & UK Office for AI scholarship recipient.
- BSc Computer Science with Industrial Experience, Queen Mary University of London (2016 – 2020) — First Class Honours. Industrial placement as a Software Engineer Intern at McAfee, on the Data Loss Prevention team.

## Publication

- Rolling Horizon NEAT for General Video Game Playing. Diego Perez-Liebana, Muhammad Sajid Alam, Raluca D. Gaina. IEEE Conference on Games (CoG), 2020. https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.06764

## Contact

- Email: sajidalam786@gmail.com
- GitHub: https://github.com/SajidAlamQB
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sajid-alam-b2a228151/
- Site: https://sajidalam.co.uk