Denzil E.

I've been the embedded Chief of AI for 50+ companies: PE firms and their portfolio companies, law firms, a Fortune 500 conglomerate, and mid-market operating businesses. I set the AI strategy with executives, then ship the production agent systems myself. ⭐ INTRODUCTORY RATE: I'm new to Upwork, so my rate is discounted while I build my history here. This window closes after my first 10 reviews. WHO I AM MIT M.Eng in Computer Science (AI concentration), Harvard MBA, and a Microsoft-trained engineer and PM. Founder & CEO of Smarty.ai since 2020, where I've spent six years designing, shipping, and operating production agentic systems. I'm often as the first AI engineer for teams that had none. Clients own 100% of the code, IP, and infrastructure I build. SELECTED OUTCOMES Triaged 100+ AI requests into a ranked roadmap for a client executive team and replaced a $1M/year vendor in the process. Cut audit cycles from 3 days to half a day, contract turnaround from 48 hours to ~1 hour, and 3x'd engineer throughput with AI-native workflows. Built a self-extending agent system running in production: agents detect capability gaps, then generate, test, and deploy their own tool integrations with self-repair and human escalation. ~80% autonomous, with the 20% requiring judgment surfaced to people. Built a secure RAG system for a government vendor answering questions across 10+ years of public records; eval scores doubled in the first month against a golden-question test suite. Trained a 100+ person global operator team to work alongside AI through standardized environments, playbooks, and feedback loops. WHAT I BUILD ✅ AI Agents & Multi-Agent Orchestration — production-grade agent architectures, tool use / function calling, conditional routing, and the human-in-the-loop escalation that keeps AI speed from turning into slop. ✅ RAG & Centralized Context Layers — the "company brain." Document indexing, embedding strategies, retrieval pipelines, grounding, and evaluation frameworks. An agent is only as good as what it knows about your business. ✅ AI-First Engineering Enablement — coding assistants wired into your codebase through repo-level agent rules and a shared context layer, agent-drafted tests, PRs pre-reviewed before a human looks, evals gating merges. ✅ AI Strategy & Roadmaps (Fractional Chief of AI) — use-case triage and prioritization, build-vs-buy, vendor replacement, adoption roadmaps, and executive alignment. ✅ LLM Application Development — Python, TypeScript, Claude and OpenAI APIs, LLM orchestration end to end, React/Node.js, Supabase/PostgreSQL. HOW I WORK Shipping the system is half the job; the other half is your team owning it after I leave. I pair with engineers, run architecture reviews, demo real workflows on your real code, document every handover, and keep feedback loops running until the new way of working is the default. Industries I've served: private equity, commercial real estate, legal, energy, manufacturing, government, and education. Send me a message with a short overview of what you're building, and I'll come back with an honest read on whether I'm the right fit and how I'd approach it. Keywords: AI Agent Development, Agentic AI, Multi-Agent Systems, RAG, Retrieval Augmented Generation, Context Engineering, LLM Orchestration, Tool Calling, MCP, Evaluation Frameworks, Evals, Claude, OpenAI, Fractional AI CTO, Chief of AI, AI Strategy, AI Adoption, Human-in-the-Loop, Python, TypeScript