I work as an independent principal: one or two substantial engagements at a time, hands-on, end to end. There is no team behind me and no agency in front of me. The person on the call is the person in the repo.
A system that doesn’t exist yet (an agent pipeline, a knowledge graph, an entity-resolution layer), built and shipped with its tests and its documentation. The Orpheus stack is the reference: four sources reconciled into one schema, a deployed product, an agent auditing it, and an oracle answering questions over it.
You get the system and the decision records.
Fractional principal for a team building its first agent infrastructure or untangling heterogeneous data. Architecture reviews, instrumenting LLM systems so you know what they cost, deciding which parts of a problem a model should not be doing at all, and making the dashboards tell the truth.
You get a second opinion you can check, on retainer.
You have an AI system answering questions over your own data, and no way to tell whether last week’s change made it better. Most teams never built the test, because the test is the tedious part. I build it, from your real questions, and hand it over:
You get a number you can defend, and the instrument that keeps producing it.
Every engagement can begin with a short, paid scoping audit: I read your system or your data, and you get written findings, a costed plan, and a build / fix / don’t-build recommendation, whether or not we go further. If we do, the fee is credited in full against the engagement. I take on two or three audits a quarter.
I write a decision record for every choice that matters, start tests on day one, measure costs instead of estimating them, and keep the agent’s reasoning in the log. If that sounds like overhead, we are not a fit. In my experience it is what keeps a project moving in month three.
The obvious worry with hiring one person is what happens when he leaves. Everything I build assumes someone else will maintain it: a project wiki and decision records grow with the code, so your team can pick the work up cold.
Write to daedalus@s-martens.com with two paragraphs: what you’re building, and where it’s stuck. I read everything and answer quickly.