Rafael M.

I build mobile apps — the real kind, native, shipped to the store, used by actual people — and lately the AI systems inside them. I've been doing the first for 20 years and the second long enough to know where it actually pays off. I'm Expert-Vetted on Upwork (top 1% of talent), with 100% Job Success, 5,700+ hours, and $200K+ earned. Behind that is 20+ years in software — a decade architecting enterprise systems at Accenture for Fortune 500s, then CTO of a SaaS startup I scaled from 3 to 30+ engineers and took to consumer scale. I'm completing Stanford's AI Professional Program now. What you get is a CTO-caliber technologist who never stopped writing production code. I work two ways, depending on what you need: ⸻ * Mobile Apps — zero to App Store * (fixed-price) You have an idea or a validated concept; I deliver the finished app, live in the App Store and Play Store. Architecture, design, frontend, backend, deployment, and the part most people underestimate — actually getting through store review, native builds, push, Live Activities, the works. I've shipped 20+ mobile apps, several used by hundreds of thousands of people, and I handle the whole build personally. Shipping a native app to a store is a different discipline than deploying a web app, and it's the discipline I've spent years in. * AI Systems and other complex software — design & build * (hourly) Production AI/LLM systems, not prototypes. My recent work is a multi-vendor LLM pipeline that benchmarked 21 model-and-strategy combinations across Claude, GPT, and Gemini over 54 recipe sources in 7 countries — automated quality scoring against an Opus gold-standard reference, and cost tuned across a 150x price spread down to the best quality-per-dollar. The hard part of AI work isn't calling an API; it's knowing where AI actually earns its keep, which model fits which job, and how to architect a pipeline that holds up in production. That's what I do, then I build it — often straight into the mobile products above. ⸻ The background behind that: 10 years at Accenture on large-scale systems for Fortune 500s in healthcare, telecom, oil & gas, and retail. Then CTO at a SaaS startup — engineering scaled 3 to 40, a multi-service platform shipped with payments, identity, and real-time processing running at consumer scale. 📎 Stanford — AI Professional Program (completing August 2026) 📎 Kellogg — Product Strategy 📎 TOGAF Certified Enterprise Architect ⸻ Native Mobile (React Native / Expo, App Store & Play Store delivery) · TypeScript/JavaScript · LLM APIs (Claude, GPT, Gemini) · Prompt Engineering · Multi-Model Pipelines · React · Next.js · Node.js · Supabase · PostgreSQL · AWS · Solution Architecture