About

Hi, I'm Vlad

I'm a senior AI engineer with 6+ years in IT and a Claude Certified Architect (Anthropic). For 2+ of those years I was on the core team at Sellify AI - one of its first technical hires, working directly with the co-founder. Sellify is a vertical SaaS selling outcome-priced AI sales and customer-support agents to US pest control operators, some of them PCT-100 companies.

I built features competitors announced but never shipped, plus the legacy-CRM integration that became Sellify's moat. Through the platform, Ninefold brought in $620k in new sales and 1,100 new accounts, HomeTeam added $1M+ in new revenue in a single month, and at Enviroguard the AI agent sold 769 accounts in a year, roughly twice the top human rep.

Sellify's founder had co-owned Fox Pest before its $350M exit to Rollins in 2023. He left me a testimonial.

Before AI I spent years in frontend and open source - I co-maintain vscode-snippet, a VS Code extension with 174,000+ installs, and I published 11 of its releases.

For the past 1.5+ years I've also been the contract senior AI engineer for a recruitment-AI SaaS, working directly with the founder. I operationalized every project with an end-to-end evals system, so the client's internal team can maintain and extend it without firefighting - and without needing me.

See my case studies → · Is Vlad Brakalo legit? →

5.0 Top Rated Plus on Upwork (top 3%) 2 yrs On the core team, Sellify AI 174K+ VS Code extension installs Claude Certified Architect Anthropic

Claude Certified Architect - Foundations, issued by Anthropic in July 2026 - a proctored exam sat through Pearson VUE, details below. Also IBM certified in Generative AI for Business Leaders & Executives and AI Agents with RAG.

Find me elsewhere: LinkedIn · YouTube · GitHub · X · Medium · Upwork · F6S · Skool · Product Hunt · DevPost.

Certification

Claude Certified Architect

Claude Certified Architect - Foundations

Issued by Anthropic · July 2026

Proctored exam · Pearson VUE Verify on Credly

This is Anthropic's own credential for engineers who architect and ship production systems on Claude. It is earned by passing a proctored exam delivered through Pearson VUE.

The syllabus is the work I already do for clients: agent and multi-agent architecture, tool and MCP interface design, context management, structured output, and keeping all of it reliable once real traffic hits it. It is exactly the ground my case studies cover.

Skills covered

Large Language Models (LLMs)
Prompt Engineering
AI System Design
Claude Agent SDK
Claude Code configuration
Context Management
Generative AI Architecture
Multi-Agent Orchestration
Production reliability
Structured output
Tool & MCP design

How I Got Here

From C programs to shipping production AI

In 2020 I was writing C programs at university. The first-semester exam was to write a linked list in C on paper - if I typed it into a computer, it had to run. I scored 80 out of 100 because I forgot to clean up malloc.

In 2021 I thought I'd be a game dev. I started building games in C++ with SFML (like this one), coding by hand - aka, manually creating training datasets for future AI coding agents. Turns out that skill was hard to market.

I tried to switch to C# and Unity, but my laptop had 2GB of RAM and ran Windows 7 - it could only run Unity 5 and Visual Studio 2012. So I gave up on games and moved to frontend engineering in 2022.

Around that time I got into open source. I'm a co-maintainer of vscode-snippet, a VS Code extension with 174,000+ installs - I have 144 commits there, more than any other person on the project, and cut 11 of its releases. I also sent a few bigger PRs to Logux, a JavaScript framework for offline-first sync (CRDTs, real-time updates, optimistic UI).

In 2023 I joined the core team at Sellify AI, a vertical SaaS for pest control companies. We built AI sales and customer support agents tied straight into their CRMs. One of the customers landed $620k in new sales and 1,100 new accounts from the AI sales system. The CEO had also been a co-owner of Fox Pest, which had a $350M exit to Rollins in 2023 - so the bar for "this has to actually work in production" was high.

Now I do that for other founders. I embed with B2B SaaS companies and ship the AI feature into their product - the demo is the easy part, my job is the version that survives once paying customers get their hands on it, with evals in CI and a handoff their own team runs.

Get Started

Let's scope your AI feature

30-minute call. Free. You leave with an architecture, the cost at your scale, and a timeline for your specific feature - whether we work together or not.

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