Questions founders ask before we work together

Your devs know your product cold. Production AI is a different craft - evals, non-determinism, cost curves, guardrails. I bring that craft, build alongside your team, and set them up to own it once I'm done.

That's most of my inbound. It's almost never the model that's wrong - usually it's the architecture or the way it was scoped. On the call I'll tell you straight whether your attempt is worth building on or better restarted. A few of the rescues and rebuilds I've done are written up in my case studies.

Only the part the feature lives in. With my current SaaS client the product is split into microservices, so I work inside a single service and never see the rest of the code. I'll set up the same kind of boundary with you - access scoped to what the work needs, and everything else stays walled off.

Whatever the job needs once you weigh quality against latency and cost. Often that's a smaller, faster model where people assume you need a frontier one - that single call cut my current client's costs a lot at 10x scale. The full rebuild is here.

Fixed scope per sprint, quoted after the free scoping call once I've seen the feature and your codebase. The quote always includes the evals and the handoff, because a feature without those isn't done.

Docs, recorded training, and the eval suite running in CI. Your team can change the feature without waiting on me. That's the point.

Fractional - I work as a contractor, not an employee. At your stage the real AI work is usually 10-15 hours a week, so a full-time hire would sit idle half the time. You get senior work at a fraction of a senior salary.

Yes. I'm Top Rated Plus on Upwork (top 3%) with a 5.0 rating, I spent 2 years on the core team at Sellify AI, and the clients I've worked with are named, with public results you can check. I put the reviews, the LinkedIn recommendations, and the case studies on one page so you can vet me in a couple of minutes: is Vlad Brakalo legit?

A senior AI engineer with 6+ years in IT. For 2 of them I was one of the first technical hires on the core team at Sellify AI, a vertical SaaS selling AI sales and support agents to US pest control operators - one customer brought in $620k in new sales through the platform. Now I embed with founder-led B2B SaaS and ship AI features into their product. The longer version, with the origin story, is on my about page.

Probably. The skill I sell is horizontal - shipping production AI features into a SaaS product - so it carries across verticals. At Sellify it was pest control, my current SaaS client is in recruitment, and my client projects span staffing agencies, health and well-being, and hotel renovation. What matters more than your industry is whether you're a founder-led SaaS with a real product and a feature you need shipped.

I'm based in Poland and work remotely, the way I already do with clients in the US and Norway, through my registered sole proprietorship, AI Development Vladyslav Brakalo. You get overlap with US mornings, full overlap with Europe, async updates, and I work inside your codebase and tools - scoped to the service the feature lives in.

Usually 4-8 weeks for a fixed scope, end to end - design in week one, then build in your codebase with evals in CI and a staged rollout. The demo is the easy part; most of that time goes into the version that survives once paying customers get their hands on it. Exact timeline depends on the feature and your codebase, which is what the free scoping call is for.

If an off-the-shelf tool does the job, buy it - I'll tell you so on the call. Build it when it's the thing customers actually ask you for, or when a competitor shipped it and you need your own version living inside your product and your data. Otherwise, buy. I only take the build side, and only when it's the right call.

A full-time senior AI hire runs $180k+ and takes months to find, for what's usually 10-15 hours a week of real AI work at your stage. An agency ships a slick demo and then the team rolls off right when an AI feature starts needing iteration. I'm one senior engineer, fractional, on a fixed scope. The handoff - evals, docs, and the training your team needs to run it - is in the price, not sold separately.

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