Robert Lingham, Lead data engineer

Rob Lingham is HMN’s data engineer whose work is quietly but fundamentally reshaping how the agency uses AI, automation and scalable engineering to drive growth. In a business dominated by strategists and creatives, Rob is the technical force making the impossible work, consistently delivering beyond his remit and earning promotion every year. As one colleague puts it, he is “the innovation spearhead of the team, always searching for new tools and solutions to improve our performance and functionalities.”

Rob has played a central role in building the infrastructure behind Havas’ most important data‑led products, including the Converged platform, which has reduced turnaround times from days to hours and driven 15–20% performance uplifts. Converged has since become a key driver of commercial success, contributing to 16 new business wins worth more than £120m. His client work demonstrates the same blend of technical depth and commercial impact. At Matalan, he architected an LLM‑powered Shopping Feed Optimiser enriching 100,000+ SKUs, delivering a 30% CTR uplift and £35k incremental revenue in four weeks, with more than £1m projected across categories. At the BBC, he built a granular campaign database enabling more accurate Marketing Mix Modelling and improving media efficiency by 14%. Beyond delivery, Rob is a cultural catalyst: embedding AI tools, automating manual processes, mentoring junior engineers and raising the technical ambition of the organisation. Rob represents the next generation of leadership, technically exceptional, commercially minded and already operating at the frontier of AI.