shipping production AI · since 2020 NAICS 541511 / 541512 / 541519  ·  CMMC-aware
§ Team·senior-only·operator-led
real names · real GitHub · no anonymous "experts"

Senior-only.
Operator-led.

Every engagement is staffed by senior practitioners — the people you meet on the first call are the people writing the code. No partner tier between you and the work. We scale capacity through a vetted contractor network when an engagement calls for it.

tenure floor
8+
years on every named role
staffing model
senior
no junior tier · no offshore
engagement model
fixed
fixed-fee · fixed-scope
surge capacity
network
vetted contractor bench
§

Practitioners.

OPERATOR-LED · NO ACCOUNT EXECS
"Anyone can sell strategy. We sell working software. The runbook is part of the deliverable. Always."
How we staff

The person who answers the phone is the person who writes the architecture diagram.

We are deliberately small. Every engagement is led by a senior practitioner who stays on the keyboard through delivery — not an account exec, not a partner, not an offshore handoff. Scope reviews, architecture decisions, and code review go through the people doing the build.

We scale through a vetted contractor network for surge capacity and specialist depth. Contractors are named on the proposal, never substituted on the call. We default to "no" on anything we don't believe we can ship — and "yes" on anything we can.

↗ Scope a call → ↗ What we do → ↗ Refinery Report → ✉ hello@thedataexperts.us →
§01 The practice.
Roles you'll work with.

No pyramid. Role-clear staffing.

Every engagement is staffed by senior practitioners in the roles listed here. We share names on the proposal and on the kickoff call — never the website. Surge capacity comes from the contractor bench below.

A
Staff Engineer
INFERENCE INFRA · AWS · vLLM

Eight years in distributed systems. Runs the inference infrastructure across most of our engagements — Bedrock, vLLM, LiteLLM routing. Maintainer on two of our OSS repos.

AWS vLLM LiteLLM
↗ github↗ linkedin
S
Security Principal
RED-TEAM · NIST AI RMF · CLEARED

Leads AI security engagements. Background in offensive security, now focused on LLM and agent system red-teaming. NIST AI RMF and EU AI Act fluent. Cleared-staff eligible.

red-team NIST AI RMF cleared
↗ github↗ linkedin
J
Senior Engineer
RAG · RETRIEVAL · EVALS

Retrieval and evaluation specialist. Built the eval-harness library we ship with most engagements. Quietly the best person on the team at writing a regression test.

pgvector evals RAG
↗ github↗ linkedin
M
Senior Strategist
FEDERAL · FAR · CMMC

Federal advisory and strategy. Twelve years navigating CMMC, FedRAMP, FAR clauses for AI services. Writes the past-performance narratives so that they're actually true.

FAR / DFAR CMMC strategy
↗ linkedin
R
Senior Engineer
DATA PLATFORM · DASK · MONGODB

Data platform lead. Maintainer on the dask ecosystem. Owns the data ingestion and federal contract intelligence work. Talks at PyData each year.

dask MongoDB data
↗ github↗ linkedin
T
Staff Engineer
AGENTS · MCP · TOOL-CALLING

Agents and MCP servers. Owns most of the six MCP servers we run in production. Co-authored two of the most-starred MCP server repos in our org.

MCP agents tool-calling
↗ github↗ linkedin
L
Senior Engineer
FRONTEND · TYPESCRIPT · UX

The person who makes the admin consoles and dashboards we ship not feel like internal tools. TypeScript, React, design-system-conscious.

TypeScript React DX
↗ github↗ linkedin
K
Operations Lead
PROCUREMENT · CONTRACTS · FINANCE

Runs the firm so the engineers can run engagements. Handles procurement, MSAs, scope docs, invoicing. The reason a fixed-fee quote shows up in 48 hours.

ops procurement contracts
↗ linkedin
§02 The bench, extended.
Surge via vetted contractors.

When we need more, we know who.

For surge capacity or specialist depth, we draw from a small, vetted network of contractors we've worked with for years. We name them on the proposal — never on the call.

Engineering bench

Principal · ML infravLLM · CUDA · GPU opsavailable
Staff · Distributed systemsKafka · Spark · streamingQ3 booked
Senior · MLOpsKubernetes · Argo · Rayavailable
Senior · Eval engineeringred-team · adversarialavailable
Senior · FrontendReact · D3 · vizlimited

Advisor bench

Former CISO · Fortune 500AI governance · enterpriseavailable
Former CAIO · Public sectorfederal AI policyavailable
Counsel · ProcurementFAR · DFAR · OTAavailable
Audit · ISO 42001RMF · audit preplimited
Partner · Privacy & PIIDPIA · GDPR · HIPAAavailable

We hire rarely.
And only senior.

Two seats open right now. We promote internally first, then post here. We never use third-party recruiters.

If you've shipped a multi-tenant LLM system or a federal AI engagement and you can point at it on GitHub, send a note to hiring@thedataexperts.us. The reply window is the same as our scoping calls: under 24 hours.

Staff · AI Engineering

RAG, agents, evals · 8+ yrs · remote-US
Apply →

Senior · AI Security

Red-team, governance · 6+ yrs · cleared a plus
Apply →

Always open: contractor bench

For specialist surge engagements
Email us →