Jessica O. Ojo

Research Engineer · LLM Evaluation · Montreal, QC

I build scalable evaluation infrastructure and benchmarking systems to understand how language models fail, where they generalize, and what it takes to make them more reliable. Currently finishing my MSc at McGill University, where my thesis focuses on evaluation methodology and the limits of standard benchmarks for LLMs. Advised by David Adelani. Previously Research Engineer at Lelapa AI, and Data Scientist at Okra Technologies.

Seeking roles building evaluation systems that improve how language models are understood, measured, and trusted.

Jessica Ojo
May 2026
Graduating with an MSc in Computer Science from McGill University.
Thesis: Evaluation Mirage: A Layered Evaluation of Large Language Models and Language Identification for African NLP.
Apr 2026
Guest lecture: Multilingual NLP - COMP/LING 345 @ McGill University
Apr 2026
Workshop organizer for the AfricaNLP workshop at EACL 2026.
Feb 2026
Talk on The Evaluation Era presented at Mila
2025
IrokoBench received an Outstanding Paper Award at NAACL 2025. Outstanding Paper
2025
AfroBench accepted at ACL 2025 — evaluating LLM performance across 64 languages and 17 tasks.
2025
Workshop organizer for the Centering Data in AI workshop at Deep Learning Indaba 2025.
2024
Recipient of the Mila EDI Excellence Award and the McGill Graduate Excellence Recruitment Award. Award
2023
MasakhaNEWS received Best Paper at AfricaNLP (ICLR 2023) and Area Chair Award at IJCNLP-AACL 2023. Best Paper

MSc, Computer Science

2024 – May 2026
McGill University — Montreal, Canada
  • Thesis: Evaluation Mirage: A Layered Evaluation of Large Language Models and Language Identification for African NLP.

Graduate Researcher

2024 – Aug 2026
Mila – Quebec AI Institute — Montreal, Canada
  • 6+ publications at top venues including ACL, NAACL, EMNLP, ICLR, and COLM — with 2 best paper awards.
  • Research focused on LLM evaluation methodology, benchmarking design, and failure-mode analysis at scale.
  • Active reviewer for ACL; workshop organizer for DLI 2025 and EACL 2026.

Research Engineer

Sept 2023 – Nov 2025
Lelapa AI — Johannesburg, South Africa

Built and drove adoption of end-to-end evaluation infrastructure — covering benchmark development, job orchestration, failure-mode diagnostics, and continuous regression monitoring across 10+ speech and language models. Worked cross-functionally as an internal evals-as-a-service layer supporting research, engineering, and product teams; reducing iteration cycles by 40%.

Data Scientist

Nov 2020 – July 2023
Okra Technologies — Lagos, Nigeria

Built and shipped production ML systems for fraud detection, NLP classification, and financial behaviour modelling. Designed end-to-end ML pipelines with automated retraining, experiment tracking, and API deployment.

View full CV→
View full publication list →

Core

Python · Data pipelines · Dataset curation · Scalable evaluation systems

Infra & MLOps

MLflow · W&B · Airflow · Docker · Slurm · Kubernetes · AWS · Azure

Evaluation & ML

Benchmark design · Regression detection · Failure-mode analysis · Statistical testing · Human-in-the-loop eval

Observability

Prometheus · Grafana · MongoDB · LLM inference (HF, vLLM, API)