Rohit delivered our MVP in 5 weeks — on budget and ahead of schedule. His architecture decisions saved us from rewriting everything when we scaled.
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Freelance AI Engineer & AI Architect — Senior AI Delivery, a Few Days a Week
You have real AI work to ship, but not enough to justify a permanent senior salary. I work as an independent AI engineer and architect on a fractional retainer: I design the system, build it, and keep it working in production.
The Problem
Somewhere between 'we should use AI' and 'we have a full AI team' is where most companies actually live: a backlog of LLM features, an agent idea that would save real money, a RAG search that half-works. A full-time senior AI engineer is a large salary plus months of hiring. Interns and task-by-task freelancing produce demos that collapse under real users, usually because nobody owned the architecture — which model, what the agent may touch, how retrieval gets evaluated, what it costs at scale. The fractional model fixes the mismatch: you get two or three days a week of someone who makes those architecture calls and has shipped production AI, and the backlog actually moves.
What You Get
- ✓AI architecture before code: model and provider choice, retrieval and agent design, permission boundaries, eval plan, and cost envelope — written down and agreed
- ✓A senior AI engineer on retainer — consistent days each week, not ad-hoc task work
- ✓Production delivery: AI agents, LLM features, RAG pipelines, workflow automation
- ✓Claude Code consulting: agentic development workflows, custom skills, MCP tooling for your engineering team
- ✓Evals and monitoring for every system shipped — you can see it working
- ✓Embedded ways of working: your repo, your Slack, your standup
- ✓Priority ordering of your AI backlog by ROI, revisited monthly
- ✓Zero lock-in: documented handoff whenever you hire full-time
Tech Stack
Claude APIClaude CodeAI AgentsRAGMCPTypeScriptPythonPostgreSQL
Timeline
Ongoing retainer, 2-3 days/week
Frequently Asked Questions
What exactly does 'fractional' mean here?
You hire a fraction of my week — typically two or three fixed days — on a monthly retainer. Those days are yours: same standups, same repo, same accountability as an employee, without the full-time salary, equity, or hiring pipeline. I work with a small number of clients at once so each gets real, focused days rather than context-switched hours.
Are you a freelance AI engineer or a fractional one?
Both, in the sense that matters to you. I'm an independent freelance AI engineer, not an agency — you work with me directly. But I don't sell gig-shaped tasks: the engagement is a fractional retainer where I own outcomes — deciding what to build, building it, measuring it in production, and iterating. That matters for AI systems, which need tuning after contact with real users; a task-based freelancer is gone by then.
What does an AI architect do before any code is written?
Makes the decisions that are expensive to reverse: whether the problem needs RAG, an agent, fine-tuning or plain code; which models and providers fit your latency, cost and data-residency limits; what an agent is allowed to read and change, enforced through scoped tools and MCP permissions; and how quality will be measured with evals before launch. You get that as a short written design you can challenge — then I build it, so the architecture never turns into slideware.
Can you train my existing team on Claude Code and AI-assisted development?
Yes — this is an increasingly common part of engagements. I set up Claude Code for your team: custom skills for your codebase, MCP servers for your internal tools, agent workflows for repetitive engineering work, and guardrails so AI-written code meets your review bar. Your engineers ship faster with AI instead of watching me do it.
Do you work with companies outside India?
Yes — I'm based in Bengaluru, India and work remote-first with companies worldwide. For US and EU clients that means significant daily timezone overlap plus async written updates. Contracts and IP assignment are structured for international engagements; NDAs signed before any scoping conversation.
When should I hire full-time instead of fractional?
When the AI workload consistently fills a full week and shapes your core product roadmap, hire full-time — and I'll help you do it: writing the job spec, interviewing candidates, and handing over a documented, monitored system rather than a mystery codebase. Fractional is the bridge that gets you to that point without burning a year of salary finding out.
Related Engagements & Reading
Fractional Forward Deployed Engineer →
When the work lives inside your operations and systems rather than your product backlog.
Claude Code Consultant →
The team-enablement half of this engagement as a standalone rollout.
Hire a Forward Deployed Engineer →
Fixed-scope pilot with a defined production outcome, if you want proof before a retainer.
Testimonials
What Clients Say
We needed a WhatsApp bot for our clinic chain. Rohit understood the problem immediately and shipped a working solution that our staff could use without training.
Tell me what you’re building
Share the problem, your timeline, and what you need help with. I’ll reply to your email.