I build AI systems that actually ship.
Fractional Head of AI. For a decade I’ve helped founders and tech leaders make real AI decisions — and shipped the systems that follow — as CTO of Mantis, the AI consultancy I co-founded, and before that leading data science at the Wellcome Trust. Now I embed with a small number of teams as their fractional Head of AI.
I’ve spent over a decade helping businesses actually use AI — not pilot after pilot, not demos that never reach production, but systems shipped onto messy real-world data and niche workflows, with the teams to run them.
For the past five years I’ve been building Mantis — the independent AI consultancy I co-founded, embedded with leadership teams from seed-stage startups to FTSE-listed companies, governments, foundations and research institutions worldwide. I’m CTO there.
My work sits at the intersection of research depth and shipping discipline. I read the papers, but I also write the migrations.
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2020—Mantis CTO & Co-founder
Co-founded and run the technical side — hiring and leading the engineering team across 30+ client engagements with governments, foundations, FTSE-listed companies and research institutions, taking ML from boardroom slide to production.
Hands-on where it counts: built custom transformer NLP and multi-head classification for Oxford Medical Simulation’s VR medical training (scaling to thousands of labels), and the GSMA Open Telecom LLMs dataset pipelines (synthetic Q&A from telecom specs, published to Hugging Face).
Write regularly — 40+ technical articles and The Token newsletter on LLMs, RAG, prompt engineering and MLOps.
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2018—2020Wellcome Trust Senior Data Scientist · Lead
Set up and led the data science team. Built grants_tagger — an open-source model that classifies Wellcome’s ~800 annual grants (£1bn+) by MeSH theme, running in production to power portfolio analytics. Applied NLP across millions of biomedical grants and policy documents; open-source releases still in active use.
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2014—2018Earlier · London startups Data Scientist
Conversocial, FactSet, Seedrs. Language detection at scale, recommender systems, factuality checks on entrepreneur statements. Learned what real production load feels like.
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2026meeting-recorder macOS · open source
Local-first macOS meeting recorder. Spots a Meet, Zoom or Teams call, asks before recording, captures the audio with ffmpeg, transcribes on-device with Whisper, then optionally has Claude tidy the raw transcript into notes. Nothing leaves the machine unless you ask.
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2026menubar macOS · open source
Two macOS menu-bar widgets, built as xbar plugins — live Claude usage (the 5-hour and weekly windows, straight from the OAuth usage API) and internet speed from a background speedtest probe. Glanceable, with nothing to open.
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2026notifly macOS · open source
A tiny Swift app that posts native macOS notifications carrying your own icon — the thing osascript and terminal-notifier can’t do on current macOS. One build script stamps out a notifier per app; ad-hoc signed, no Apple Developer account.
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“Calm, collected, and always on top of the ML/AI industry — a great CTO, steering the ship with precision without falling for hype. He aligns technical decisions with clients’ business objectives, and as a leader provides valuable guidance and takes feedback into account.”
“Mantis have been a key component of our growth within the LLM domain. Their expertise, pragmatism and collaborative approach has made them a trusted partner to accelerate our ML advancements.”
“We trust the quality of Mantis’s work and the diligence they take in getting to solutions. They work collaboratively, support our internal data scientists, and feel like part of our team.”
Working with me
I take on a small number of fractional and advisory engagements at a time, alongside my work at Mantis — remote, across UK / EU / US timezones. Most start with a fixed-fee audit or roadmap, then convert to an ongoing fractional retainer. If you’re a founder or executive trying to make real AI decisions, not buy demos — the fastest start is a short intro call.
> ssh nick@nsorros.com email nick.sorros@proton.me call meet.nsorros.com github github.com/nsorros in linkedin.com/in/nsorros status available q4 2026$ compose --to nick.sorros@proton.me_