work with me
You committed to shipping AI. Nobody on your team has done it before.
I have. $10,000 a month, month to month — the architecture decisions and the merged production code, from the same person. No scoping cycle before you get a number.
One to two seats open · async-first · Powell River, BC
the offer
One person. Advisory and the code.
Most senior AI help splits in two. A consultant makes the calls and hands you a document. An agency writes the code and hands you juniors making the calls. You end up paying for the seam between them.
This is one line item. I make the architecture decisions with your team, then I write and merge the code that implements them. The deliverable is shipped software plus the reasoning behind it — not a report.
what people hire this for
Same retainer. Three shapes.
Ship it
Get the feature into production
You have a prototype that demos well and falls over under real traffic. I take it the rest of the way — the evals, the failure modes, the retries, the cost ceiling, the parts a demo never has to survive.
Defend it
Make it survive a security review
Your AI feature is live and now a customer's security team is asking what it did and why. Audit trail, approval gates, access controls, retention. I built exactly this inside a SOC 2 Type II and HIPAA environment at WhaleHawk.
Read the WhaleHawk case →Fix the ground
Make your team able to ship weekly
The AI work isn't the bottleneck — the delivery process is. Tests, CI/CD, and a pipeline that turns a release from an event into a Tuesday. At Kardio that took deployments from weeks to under 10 minutes.
Read the Kardio case →fit
Worth an email, and worth not wasting yours.
This is for you if
- You have an engineering team, and nobody on it has shipped an AI system to production
- You've already committed to shipping AI — a roadmap item, a launched beta, a stalled prototype, or a promise to a customer
- You're 10 to 150 people, and the person who signs is the founder, the CTO, or the VP Eng
- You already buy senior help by the month somewhere else, so a retainer isn't a strange shape
- You're a studio or agency that sold an AI build and needs a senior specialist behind it
This isn't for you if
- You want a fixed bid on a scope nobody has defined yet
- You're shopping an hourly rate. I don't bill hourly — you'd be pricing hours when the thing you need is judgment
- You need a full-time hire. Hire one. I'm the wrong shape for a permanent seat
- You're over a thousand people. Your procurement cycle will outlast a one-person studio
- You have no engineers yet. Get to a product first
If you're not sure which column you're in, ask — I'll tell you honestly. A wrong fit costs me more than it costs you.
terms
One number, said out loud.
$10,000 / month
Month to month. Thirty days' notice, either side. Invoiced monthly in advance.
- Commitment
- Month to month, minimum one month. No annual lock-in.
- Notice
- Thirty days, either direction.
- Billing
- Monthly, in advance. USD.
- How we work
- Async-first, with one standing working session each week.
- You get
- Merged production code, the architecture decisions behind it, and me in your Slack.
- Not offered
- Hourly billing. Fixed bids on undefined scope. Anything shorter than a month.
Longer blocks by agreement, at the same rate — there's no discount for buying more months, because the rate isn't a volume question.
proof
I run this stuff myself before I bill anyone for it.
Three years of backend engineering on WhaleHawk, an AI sales intelligence platform live in healthcare — vector search, data pipelines, and the compliance engineering underneath a SOC 2 Type II and HIPAA six-year retention environment. Two years as CTO of Generosity Catalyst, a product with paying customers, shipping features weekly. At Kardio, deployments went from weeks to under 10 minutes.
And Engram is mine: open source memory infrastructure running 4,500+ memories in production at 124ms p50 recall, behind 1,500+ tests. Six Apache-2.0 repositories. Not a client project — the reason I can tell you what an agent system does at three in the morning is that I operate one.
What I won't claim: SOC 2 Type II is WhaleHawk's certification, not mine. Nobody has bought this retainer as packaged here — it's a shape, offered honestly, not a track record I'm dressing up. And there are no testimonials on this site, because the last version of it had invented ones and I took them down.
next
Four steps, and a number on the first call.
- 01
You send the messy version.
Two paragraphs is plenty. What you're trying to ship, what's in the way, and when it needs to work. No brief required. I reply within one business day.
- 02
Thirty minutes, and you leave with the price.
A real call, not a discovery process. I'll tell you what I think the actual problem is, whether I'm the right person for it, and confirm the number. If I'm not the right person I'll say so on that call.
- 03
A one-page start, not a proposal cycle.
What we're going after in month one, what “working” means, and how you'd know. One page, sent same week. There's no proposal phase because there's nothing to negotiate — the price is the price.
- 04
Week one, code.
Not a discovery phase, not an audit deliverable. Something merged in the first week, then a weekly working session and me in your Slack.
You can stop after any month. Thirty days' notice, no exit conversation, no clawback. That's the version of this that's fair to both of us — it means I have to keep earning it, and it means you never have to be talked into staying.
the honest part
What you're probably thinking.
“$10,000 is a lot for one person.”
It's less than a senior AI engineer costs you fully loaded, and you can stop in thirty days — which you can't do with a hire. The comparison that matters isn't me against a salary. It's me against another quarter of not shipping it.
“You're one person. What if you get hit by a bus?”
Fair, and it's why I write things down. The decisions live in your repo and your docs, not in my head, and the code is yours as it merges. If I disappear, your team keeps a system they can read. I'd also tell you when a problem genuinely needs three people — that's a real answer I give.
“Can't we just use an agency?”
You can, and sometimes you should. An agency sells you a team and staffs the people who are free. If the work needs six people in parallel, that's the better buy. If it needs one person who's already shipped this and will stay in the details, that's this.
“Are you actually available?”
Yes — for one or two engagements. That's a real ceiling, not a marketing one: one person, not a bench, and I'd rather be in the details on two than skimming five. When it's full I'll tell you that instead of taking your money and queuing you.
work with me
A good first conversation is a short one.
Send the messy version. What you're trying to ship, what's in the way, and when it has to work. I'll tell you within a day whether I'm the right person, and you'll have the price on the first call.