Home / Hire

Hire an Applied AI engineer

I am a Senior Full-Stack & Applied AI Engineer. I build production LLM agent pipelines, most recently at CodeWisp (YC W26), with 13+ years of full-stack work behind me. Available now for Applied AI and Forward Deployed roles, fully remote.

Most AI work fails not at the model but at the engineering around it: data, evaluation, cost control, and shipping something that holds up in production. That is where my background helps, since I have spent years building reliable data pipelines and full-stack systems.

I can take an AI feature or agent from idea to a shipped, evaluated, cost-aware product, and I am honest about where AI helps and where it quietly adds risk.

Most recent: CodeWisp (YC W26)

At CodeWisp, an AI game-generation platform, I built the generation pipeline as a chain of agentic stages, working directly with the founder in twice-weekly product calls.

  • Sequential agent stages: routing, research, build, art, audio, quality gate and publish.
  • Multi-model routing across Claude Opus, Sonnet and Haiku, matched to task complexity and kept under a fixed $6 per-run cost cap.
  • An LLM-as-judge eval stage that checks sprite consistency, level passability, win states and mechanics, retries on failure and logs findings to improve the system prompts.
  • AI code generation constrained to a Lua sandbox to cut hallucinated code.
  • A deterministic 2D/3D runtime at 60 fps with hash-based verification and per-game engine versioning.

Before that I built Codepost, an AI code security scanner and PR-triage bot, and prototyped an AML alert-triage copilot and a helpdesk auto-QA tool. Read the CodeWisp case →

What I bring

  • AI features and agents wired into real products, not demos.
  • Evaluation, cost control, and reliability around LLMs: LLM-as-judge evals, multi-model routing, sandboxed code execution, RAG with embeddings and vector search.
  • Working directly with founders and customers to scope, demo and iterate.
  • Full-stack engineering foundation in Go, TypeScript, Node, and React.

Proof, not promises

Real work, written up plainly:

Let us talk

Tell me what you are building. I reply fast.

playcivil@gmail.com See the portfolio →