I build the systems that make AI and software products work end to end

Founding engineer or fractional CTO for teams building AI products; senior or staff engineering roles for teams ready to scale.

Book an intro call See what I've shipped

5 founding engineer rolesCredit, insurance, climate, marketplaces, and developer tools

Start with what you need

A clear next step for your team

Whether you're building a product or hiring the person to build it, find the most relevant details first.

For founders and product teams

Bring an AI product into production.

Get hands-on help with the backend, data pipelines, and AI integrations that need to work reliably for real users.

Explore ways to work together

For hiring teams

Find an engineer who owns the hard parts.

Review experience building AI product infrastructure across early-stage teams.

Review my experience

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 a founding engineer five times, 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.