Meet the People Behind Xephyr

Alex Mercer

CEO & Co-Founder

Alex has spent 15 years building AI and data products across financial services, healthcare, and retail. Before founding Xephyr, he led data strategy at two FTSE 100 companies and advised Series B startups on scaling their data teams. He believes the best AI projects start with boring, reliable infrastructure.

Sofia Nakamura

CTO & Co-Founder

Sofia is a distributed systems engineer who built her first data pipeline at 19 and hasn't stopped since. She architected lakehouse platforms processing petabytes daily before co-founding Xephyr to bring that rigour to mid-market organisations. She leads technical direction, hiring, and engineering culture.

Marcus Thompson

Head of Data Engineering

Marcus spent eight years at cloud hyperscalers before joining Xephyr. He specialises in high-throughput streaming pipelines and has a particular obsession with data quality — he built an open-source schema validation library that's been downloaded over 2 million times. He leads all client data infrastructure engagements.

Priya Sharma

ML Lead

Priya holds a PhD in statistical machine learning and has shipped production models in domains ranging from fraud detection to demand forecasting. She leads Xephyr's ML practice with a focus on model reliability, explainability, and the organisational processes that get models from prototype to production.

James O'Brien

Senior AI Strategy Consultant

James works directly with executive teams to define AI strategy and build the business cases that get initiatives funded. He has led AI readiness assessments at over 40 organisations across manufacturing, logistics, and professional services. His frameworks for use case prioritisation are used across the Xephyr practice.

Yuki Chen

Data Engineer

Yuki joined Xephyr after building data infrastructure at two fast-growing startups. She specialises in real-time ingestion and has deep expertise in Apache Kafka, Flink, and the modern lakehouse ecosystem. She's known internally for her exceptionally clear technical documentation.

Lena Vasquez

Product Designer

Lena designs the interfaces that make data accessible to the people who need it. She has a background in information design and spent six years building BI tools before moving into product design for AI-powered applications. She leads design for all client-facing dashboard and analytics products at Xephyr.

Daniel Park

Operations Manager

Daniel keeps Xephyr running smoothly — from client onboarding to delivery coordination and internal tooling. He has a background in management consulting and brings structured process thinking to everything from project kickoffs to quarterly business reviews. He's the person everyone at Xephyr calls when something unexpected happens.