Manuscripts Don’t Burn
In the post-AI world, where does the struggle go?
Director, AI Foundry · FactSet
Joshua E. Lambert, PhD
AI and ML engineering leader building enterprise AI for financial data, with a research career in machine learning for security and political forecasting.
- 20+
- people led
- 3
- continents
- 16
- publications
- 650+
- client firms on the MCP platform
- AI organization leadership. I lead the Knowledge Services organization in FactSet's AI Foundry: more than 20 engineers, MLOps specialists and researchers on a global team spanning the Americas, Europe and Asia.
- Production AI for financial data. Promoted from Senior ML Engineer to Director in four years, building the knowledge graph, retrieval and enrichment services behind FactSet's agentic products, including services powering its MCP platform (650+ client firms).
- Research and teaching. PhD in Security Studies with 16 publications, 8 of them peer-reviewed. Visiting Professor teaching PhD-level ML/AI at the University of South Alabama.
Experience
Resume and full CVFactSet
S&P 500 financial data and analytics company serving more than 9,200 clients and 260,000 users
- 2026 – Present
Director, AI Foundry Vice President
Lead the Knowledge Services organization within FactSet's AI Foundry, more than 20 people across engineering, MLOps and research, on a global team spanning the Americas, Europe and Asia.
- Own the Knowledge Services platform, a unified enrichment layer (entity, date, metric and concept resolution) served via API and MCP to FactSet's agentic products and its MCP platform (650+ client firms).
- Drive Intelligent Document Services and semantic-layer strategy for flagship agents, including a pre-earnings research agent and the firm-wide agent platform.
- Grew the organization from a single 4-person team to more than 20 people in four sub-teams, three led by managers who report to me plus a dedicated architecture team.
- 2024 – 2026
Associate Director, Data Solutions AI
- Led enterprise knowledge graph infrastructure to production scale (500M+ nodes, 2B+ relationships), with GNN-based reasoning powering AI financial products.
- Architected production RAG pipelines and LLM orchestration over multi-modal financial data.
- 2022 – 2023
Senior Machine Learning Engineer
- Took graph database infrastructure from prototype to production, setting data-modeling and query standards for billion-edge knowledge graphs.
SparkCognition Government Systems
AI for defense and government
- 2021 – 2022
Machine Learning Engineer, NLP
- Built production transformer NLP and information retrieval pipelines for Air Force Research Labs and other defense clients, surfacing technical documents from millions of unstructured records.
University of Central Florida
- 2020 – 2021
Postdoctoral Scholar, ML/NLP National Center for Integrated Coastal Research
- 2016 – 2020
Quantitative Research Associate IC Center for Academic Excellence; Kurdish Political Studies Program
- Built ML and NLP models for conflict prediction and leader analysis, and led the team behind the open-access PsyCL Dataset.
Research
All publicationsMy research applies machine learning and NLP to security studies: forecasting coups and political instability, measuring leader psychology at a distance, and tracing how climate drives fisheries conflict. Recent work moves the same methods into economics and finance.
2026
2022
Psychological Characteristics of Leaders (PsyCL): Introducing a New Data Set. Foreign Policy Analysis
2022
2021
The causes and consequences of fisheries conflict around the Horn of Africa. Journal of Peace Research
Teaching
CoursesGlobal Scholar and Visiting Professor in the PhD in Business Administration program at the University of South Alabama’s Mitchell College of Business, and earlier Instructor of Record at the University of Central Florida.
- ML/AI for Business Analysis
- Python for Business Analysis
- GIS for Political Analysis
Talks and media
All talks2026
FactSet FOCUS user conference, speaker: Digital Transformation in the AI Era, with Ryan Roser
2025
FactSet Developer Days, speaker: vectorization strategies
2023
FactSet Developer Days, moderator: GenAI system design
2022
Boeing Intelligence & Analytics: AI and NLP solutions for DoD partners
2022
Swiss Radio Television (RTS): predicting military coups
2019
Al Jazeera, The Stream: the Sudan conflict
Writing
Subscribe on SubstackLonger-form thinking on AI, research and whatever else I’m chewing on, published on Substack.
A Light of One's Own
Owning your own signal in the age of total capture
Publish Your Priors
Your knowledge base is collaboration infrastructure. Treat it like one.
Testimonials
“As a coauthor and collaborator, Josh has always exceeded in his end of the bargain. Providing expertise in quantitative methodologies and ensuring technical excellence in all research.”
Chris F., Assistant Professor
“On our contract, Josh rapidly built a full ML/NLP pipeline that allowed us to scale cutting our timeline by over 6 weeks, while achieving over 90% accuracy. Well above our acceptance criteria.”
Colleen D., Social Scientist
“Josh consistently provided workshops and training on advanced ML/NLP topics oftentimes for audiences that were not versed in the topics. He made them approachable and ensured participants always left having achieved some degree of content absorption.”
Rebecca S., Director of Quant Research
“As a product manager, working with Josh always made things easy. He was able to convey complicated technical knowledge to stakeholders in an approachable manner, and achieved deadlines with ease. Prepared and professional.”
Jake S., Sr Product Manager
Advising and consulting
ServicesThrough J.E. Lambert Consulting LLC I take on a small number of advisory engagements in knowledge graphs, LLM systems and applied ML, and I give workshops for teams adopting AI.