Work with me
Three ways to work together: AI agents on your real systems, data platforms that carry money, and an architect for a growing team.
I take on a small number of part-time engagements, remotely. Availability is limited, so write to contact@ivanblinov.com to discuss.
AI agents for engineering teams
For teams that want agents to see production without being able to change it.
- MCP servers over your databases, orchestration, observability, Git and tracker.
- Guardrails in capabilities, not in prompts: read-only roles enforced by the systems themselves, tool and egress allowlists, audit.
- An AI on-call agent and agentic code review, measured in shadow mode before anyone relies on them.
Start with an audit of what agents can safely touch, or go straight to a build. Usually 2–6 weeks. Evidence: an AI-agent platform for a data team.
Data platforms: performance, migrations, correctness
For ClickHouse, PostgreSQL, Greenplum and Kafka platforms where the numbers carry money.
- Performance and reliability: the mechanism behind a slowdown or an incident, a fix plan and its verification. 1–3 weeks.
- Migrations and lakehouse: cluster moves, key-type migrations, Iceberg, Trino and Spark designs with ADRs and a working proof of concept. 3–8 weeks.
- Billing correctness: executable specifications and formal checks for money logic in SQL and Go. 2–6 weeks.
Evidence: a global lock in ClickHouse, an int32 overflow race, formal methods on billing.
Fractional data and AI architect
One or two days a week for startups and scale-ups: architecture, design and code review, hiring, roadmap, and an engineering process built around coding agents. Retainer. Evidence: I am co-founder and CTO of Groupsi, and earlier I grew an engineering team from 6 to 20.
How I work
- I work with coding agents and verify everything they produce: the speed of a small team with one accountable engineer.
- Fixed scope, retainer or hourly.
- Remote from the Americas (UTC−3 to UTC−6): a full-day overlap with US time zones, mornings with Europe.
- In English, Spanish, French, Portuguese or Russian.
How to start
- Write to contact@ivanblinov.com. A paragraph about the problem and your stack is enough.
- A short call to see whether I am the right person for it.
- A written scope with the result, the timeline and the price, before any work starts.