For founders and engineering leaders
Practical services for startups building AI software
Typical engagements: senior judgment on architecture and delivery without expanding headcount permanently. Scoped to concrete decisions and how engineering runs week to week.
Commercial risk
With AI in the product, common failure modes are model behaviour, data leakage, runaway inference cost, and brittle automation. Work is translated into engineering tasks: service contracts, evaluation hooks, controls in CI/CD, and reporting leadership can read. Output is incremental changes to the system and process, not narrative.
Concrete work areas
Technical direction & architecture
Product technical direction, platform boundaries, systems that mix deterministic services with LLM features. Traffic and team growth without unplanned rewrites.
Engineering workflow with agents
Where AI-assisted coding fits: branch policy, review expectations, tests, and ownership when generated patches merge. Reduces noise in review and avoids silent drift.
Control plane for delivery and operations
CI/CD, environments, secrets, release governance. Relevant when deploy frequency is high and the team is small.
Knowledge, retrieval, and product truth
What lives in transactional stores vs retrieval, freshness, access control, and maintenance of corpora exposed to models.
Operating model & engineering leadership
Role boundaries between research, platform, and product engineering; planning cadence; communication with non-engineering stakeholders on trade-offs and dates.
Hands-on execution
Short embeds for launch, refactor, incident hardening, or interview loops—code and review alongside the team where useful.
How engagements usually run
- Discovery: goals, constraints, current delivery setup, first pain points.
- Written note: risks, priorities, ordered plan, trade-offs stated.
- Execution: working sessions, ADRs, optional embed until routines hold.
- Exit: agreed hand-off; extension only if scoped.
Fit
Small team, AI in the product or in the build pipeline, need for clearer architecture and process. Initial call is to check scope and whether the work is a match.
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