I build the systems behind AI products.

Founding engineer, fractional CTO, or a senior/staff backend role.

Get in touch See what I've shipped

Three ways to work with me

Different commitments, different stages. Here is what you get in the first month of each.

Founding engineer

Full-time, equity-weighted

Pre-seed to Series A, first or second engineer

Stand up the backend, the deploy pipeline, and the on-call story
Own the data model and the API surface the next engineers build against
Ship the first production version with you, then help hire the team around it

Fractional CTO

10–20 hrs/week

Founders who need technical direction without a full-time hire

Architecture review and a roadmap you can hand to a contractor or a new hire
Engineering hiring — screening, interview loops, leveling
Infrastructure and vendor decisions, including what they cost at your stage

Senior / staff software engineer

Full-time, backend-leaning

Series A onward with an existing team. NYC or remote

Backend services in Python and TypeScript on AWS
LLM integration that survives a provider outage — retries, backoff, failover
High-availability APIs and the ingestion pipelines behind them

About

Where I've been, and how I work.

Andrew Aliaj, backend and AI engineer, based in New York City

How I work

I've been the first engineer twice, which means I've also been the person carrying the pager. That shapes what I build: LLM calls get retries and a second provider because one provider will go down, and I'd rather design the schema once than migrate it under load.

Most of my work is the unglamorous half of an AI product — the ingestion, the extraction, the orchestration, and the parts that have to keep working when a provider does not.

The six companies I've built for are in Startup Experience, and what came of the work is under what I work with.

Startup Experience

Productivity Sumo

Founder and Software Engineer

Productivity Management Software

LoanBlocks

CTO, Co-Founder, Founding Software Engineer

Derisk Credit Agreements with AI Covenant Review

SignCode Inc

Founding Engineer

Municipal Sign Code Ordinance Checks for Sign Makers

RiskHelm

Founding Engineer

First-Party Insurance for AI That Acts on Its Own

Validus Nexus

Software Engineer

AI Business Matchmaking for Founders, Funders, and Family Offices

Immpression

Founding Engineer

Mobile Marketplace for Buying and Selling Art

What I work with

Backend and systems first. The frontend is real, it just isn't the reason to hire me.

Where I've used it

LLM orchestration

Multi-provider failover, retries with exponential backoff, and priority-based task routing, at LoanBlocks.

Document pipelines

Ingestion and extraction for credit agreements and covenant review, running on AWS for institutional lenders.

Realtime dashboards

A Next.js and Go dashboard streaming live updates over WebSockets.

Query performance

Caching took dashboard queries from 2s to 200ms. Schema design in PostgreSQL and Prisma cut Productivity Sumo query time 30%.

Scale on FastAPI

An ESG score analyzer processing 100k+ daily environmental metrics with sub-second responses. Built at a climate hackathon, where it won most innovative.