Consulting

Fractional Head of AI

I embed in your engineering team: in the codebase, in the architecture reviews, in the sprint planning. I ship code alongside your engineers and own outcomes, not slide decks.

Three services. Pick what fits.

01 · Agent engineering

Building AI agents as products.

The model is maybe twenty percent of the work. The other eighty is the architecture between the model and the user: context engineering, state management, observability, graceful degradation. That's the part I do. See the full agent engineering methodology.

Multi-agent orchestration

frameworks

LangGraph for deterministic control flow, OpenAI Agents SDK for delegation, Claude Agent SDK for codebase interaction. I pick the framework based on what the problem needs.

Voice & video AI

pipelines

Real-time voice agents for customer interactions. Video pipelines for KYC, document verification, and visual processing.

RAG systems

retrieval

Hybrid search with re-ranking, context window management, handling ambiguous queries and stale data. Sub-second responses at scale.

MCP server architectures

integration

Connecting agents to live infrastructure: databases, APIs, monitoring dashboards, so they operate on real data, not stale context.

Context engineering

discipline

Designing what information agents see, when they see it, and how it's structured. The discipline that determines whether agents are reliably useful or reliably dangerous.

Observability & graceful degradation

reliability

Agents that know when they're uncertain, escalate correctly, and fail without taking down the system. LangFuse tracing, structured logging, fallback chains.

02 · Agentic engineering

Making your team measurably faster.

Not a workshop and a slide deck. I install the infrastructure in your codebase and run the first agent-native sprint with your team. See the full SDLC 2.0 methodology.

Spec-driven development

constitutions

CLAUDE.md constitutions, AGENTS.md cross-tool rules, three-tier agent boundaries. The specification infrastructure that makes everything else work.

Parallel agent workflows

worktrees

Git worktrees, Claude Code, Codex, Agent Teams. 3-5 concurrent agents on independent tasks, each in isolation, PRs created for review.

Quality gates & hooks

enforcement

PreToolUse and PostToolUse hooks that enforce linting, type-checking, and tests on every agent action. Hard gates, not suggestions.

Context engineering workshops

enablement

Training your team on Skills, memory systems, and the boundary policies that separate 3× teams from teams drowning in AI-generated debt.

03 · Agent infra & platforms

Building the internal agent platform.

Deploying agents to production is one thing; running them well across teams, runtimes, and regulators is another. The “agent platform engineer” role for companies that don't have one yet.

Agent registry & manifests

source of truth

One YAML source of truth per agent: owner, runtime, model provider, data tier, tools (inline / MCP / Skill). Pydantic-validated. Powers the dashboard, governance reviews, and onboarding.

Multi-runtime catalog & deployment

infrastructure

Vercel AI SDK, Claude Agent SDK, AWS Lambda, Pulumi-managed GKE: all in one registry. Infrastructure-as-code for the long-running agent fleet (Kubernetes manifests, GitHub Actions via Workload Identity Federation, secrets in Secret Manager). Teams keep their preferred runtime; the platform unifies visibility.

Cross-agent observability

tracing

OpenTelemetry + Langfuse wired identically on every deployment. Trace one customer's flow across N agents and runtimes. Span attribution by firm, agent, and domain.

Capability registry & graduation

reuse

Inline TS function → MCP server → Claude Skill, then published to a curated registry that any agent on any runtime can search and install via MCP. So a tool built for one team isn't reinvented by the next.

Data tiers & boundaries

governance

Public / internal / confidential / regulated: declared in manifest, enforced in routing. Maps to model selection so sensitive data never reaches a public-cloud frontier model by accident.

Internal dashboard

visibility

FastAPI dashboard serving the cross-firm view: who owns which agent, which model, last trace, cost trend, data tier. The single shared source of truth you can hand a new joiner and a regulator alike.

The stack

The tools I reach for, organized by what they do.

agent frameworksLangGraph, OpenAI Agents SDK, Claude Agent SDK

coding agentsClaude Code, Codex, Agent Teams

orchestrationCLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md, Skills, Hooks

infrastructureMCP Servers, Azure AI Foundry, Vercel

platformPydantic manifests, FastAPI dashboards, multi-runtime registry

deploymentPulumi, Kubernetes / GKE, AWS Lambda, GitHub Actions

voice & videoVapi, Deepgram, ElevenLabs, Tavus, Twilio

observabilityLangFuse, LangSmith, OpenTelemetry

Proven outcomes

From shipped systems, not slideware.

KYC hours → minutes

LangGraph video agent replaced a manual verification pipeline.

Campaign creation 2 weeks → 10 min

GenAI pipeline automated what took a team of designers.

retention lift

Deep RL personalization engine, 5M+ daily predictions.

1,000+monthly autonomous interactions

Voice agents handling real customer calls without human oversight.

Sub-second RAG responses

Hybrid search with re-ranking across ambiguous product catalogs.

$20M+annual transactions

AI pipeline processing 1B+ events monthly at scale.

Why me, not a consulting firm

The big firms are spinning up agentic AI practices. They'll send you three juniors supervised by a partner who has never deployed an agent.I've been on the other side of this. The juniors are good; the supervision isn't the bottleneck. The bottleneck is that no one on the team has shipped an agent that handled real money at 3am.

I've been building production AI for 14+ years: three startups, 40 under 40 Data Scientist, published researcher. And I spent years on the investor side evaluating 30+ AI startups. You get someone who has already made the mistakes, not someone learning on your timeline.


Tell me what you're building and where you're stuck: raman.shrivastava.7@gmail.com