# 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](mailto: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](https://ivanblinov.com/work/#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](https://ivanblinov.com/work/#a-global-lock-in-clickhouse-behind-portal-timeouts), [an int32 overflow race](https://ivanblinov.com/work/#racing-an-int32-overflow-across-three-database-engines), [formal methods on billing](https://ivanblinov.com/work/#formal-methods-on-production-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](https://groupsi.com.br), 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

1. Write to [contact@ivanblinov.com](mailto:contact@ivanblinov.com). A paragraph about the problem and your stack is enough.
2. A short call to see whether I am the right person for it.
3. A written scope with the result, the timeline and the price, before any work starts.

---

Source: https://ivanblinov.com/work-with-me/