Staff Engineer · Contract & Fractional · NYC / US-Remote
I'm Max Awad — a staff-level platform and AI-infrastructure engineer with ~13 years across Apple, Google, and Meta, now building LLM agent systems (Python & TypeScript — agents, tools, RAG/MCP, evaluation, and reliable orchestration). Available for contract, retainer, and fractional-staff work.
Currently available for new contract & fractional engagements.
Focused engagements where senior, hands-on help moves the needle fastest.
Design and build agent systems, tool/function calling, RAG pipelines, and MCP integrations — with evaluation and observability so they stay reliable in production. Python and TypeScript.
Let's talk →Backend services and platforms, ingestion / indexing / retrieval, reliability and observability, and developer tooling — informed by platform work across Apple, Google, and Meta.
Let's talk →Architecture reviews, eval/observability setup, and hands-on technical direction for AI and platform teams — on a retainer or fractional basis that scales to your needs.
Let's talk →~13 years of platform and infrastructure work at three of the most demanding engineering organizations — and, more recently, a delivered agent engagement and a company of my own, where the deciding and the building are the same job.
Built reusable experimentation infrastructure relied on by roughly 300 engineers — the kind of internal platform work that has to stay dependable at scale.
Worked on production ingestion, indexing, and retrieval systems — directly relevant to today's RAG and search work.
Delivered CI/CD and platform tooling, the foundations that let engineering teams ship reliably.
A two-month engagement building AI agent infrastructure for display glasses and the MIRA companion app — connecting multimodal models, tools, and device services into workflows that hold up in front of users. Python-first orchestration and integration layers across cloud and device.
Founded and run iMAKE, building AI-enabled products and agentic workflows end to end — product architecture through hands-on engineering across agents, automation, full-stack apps, cloud services, and API integrations. This is where the 0→1 work happens: deciding what to build, then building it.
Small projects rather than client systems — but the retrieval, grounding, and agent plumbing in them is real and readable.
A FAQ support copilot whose answers cite the entry they came from, with session memory for follow-ups and routing that hands authentication problems to a human instead of inventing steps. Express, with a template fallback when no model key is present.
View on GitHub →A FastAPI build of the same idea: keyword-scored retrieval over structured FAQ entries, source-cited answers, and both session and longer-term memory.
View on GitHub →Next.js and TypeScript over Postgres, with a voice and chat agent built on the OpenAI Realtime API driving the project and task APIs directly.
View on GitHub →The rest of what's public — experiments, tooling, and older work — lives on my GitHub profile.
github.com/maxawad →I'm a NYC-based staff-level engineer focused on distributed systems, backend platforms, and AI infrastructure. Over ~13 years I've worked across Apple, Google, and Meta — from CI/CD and platform delivery, to production ingestion, indexing, and retrieval, to reusable experimentation infrastructure for large engineering teams.
Right now I build LLM agent platforms hands-on: agents and tools, RAG and MCP integrations, and the evaluation and observability that keep them dependable. I take on contract, retainer, and fractional-staff engagements where that experience is directly useful.
Education: a B.S. in Computer Science & Finance from the New Jersey Institute of Technology.
Clear scope, senior execution, and honest calibration throughout.
A short intro call to understand the problem, constraints, and what success looks like.
A written scope, timeline, and rate up front — hourly, retainer, or fractional.
Hands-on delivery with evaluation and reliability built in, not bolted on.
Documented, maintainable work — and a clear path for your team to own it.
Flexible structures — all start with a written scope and rate. Contract & fractional from $150/hr.
Ongoing senior capacity for your AI or platform team — a committed number of hours each month on a monthly retainer. Indicative: 10 hrs/week from $6,500/mo, 20 hrs/week from $13,000/mo. Larger weekly commitments are quoted on the same floor — just ask.
A defined build with a clear outcome — e.g. an agent/RAG feature, an eval & observability setup, or a backend/platform improvement — scoped hourly or fixed.
Architecture reviews and hands-on technical direction for AI and platform teams, on a lightweight recurring basis. Indicative: 4 hrs/week from $2,600/mo.
Judging whether AI-generated work is actually correct: grading model output for correctness, completeness, maintainability, and production-readiness, and building the eval harnesses, regression tests, and retrieval-quality measurement that catch what spot-checking misses. For AI labs and teams shipping model-generated code. Scoped hourly, from $150/hr.
The quick answers most teams want before a first call.
Contract, retainer, and fractional-staff engineering: LLM agents, RAG/MCP, evaluation & observability, and backend/platform architecture. Python and TypeScript.
Worth saying up front so neither of us spends three calls finding out. I don't take design-led frontend or mobile app work (iOS/Android). I'm not a Java/Spring enterprise-stack engineer. I build the systems around models — retrieval, tooling, evaluation, orchestration — rather than training or fine-tuning the models themselves. On cloud, I've shipped on AWS and Google Cloud — deployments, CI/CD, and the data and infrastructure layers around them — but AWS-native architecture isn't my depth: my platform work was on internal infrastructure at Apple, Google, and Meta, and I haven't built on Bedrock. I don't work in Azure. And I'm not a domain specialist in regulated fields such as clinical/medical or fintech compliance: I'd be the infrastructure underneath that product, not the domain expert. If your role needs one of those, I'll tell you in the first reply.
Some product-engineering reqs say plainly that candidates from large, heavily segmented engineering organizations may not be a fit, and prefer people who have founded or worked at early-stage companies. It's a fair filter, so here's the honest answer: the Apple, Google, and Meta years are real and so is the other half. I founded iMAKE and run it now, deciding what to build and then building it. Before that I delivered a two-month agent engagement at MIRA as an outside contractor. I'm used to owning an outcome end to end, talking to the people who'll use the thing, and shipping without a platform team underneath me.
Hourly from $150/hr, or a monthly retainer for ongoing capacity — indicatively 10 hrs/week from $6,500/mo and 20 hrs/week from $13,000/mo. Larger weekly commitments, including near-full-time contract engagements, are quoted on the same $150/hr floor — ask and I'll tell you what I can commit to. The rate is cash. Equity is welcome alongside it, but not in place of it — if the budget for the contract is equity only, or equity plus a token cash rate, I'm the wrong fit and you'll save time skipping me. Every engagement starts with a written scope and rate — no surprises.
NYC-based, working US-remote (Eastern time). Happy to overlap with your team's core hours and meet in person for NYC-area work.
Email a short note on the problem, rough timeline, and weekly hours you're after. We'll do a 20-minute scoping call, then agree scope and rate in writing before any work begins.
Happy to hear from you — please include the approved rate range, the location requirement, and the weekly hours in your first email. The $150/hr floor is the same on W2, 1099, or corp-to-corp. One thing worth saying plainly, because it comes up on most reqs: $150 is a floor, not a band I fit inside — if your approved range straddles it, like $100–150 or $70–150, please confirm placement at $150 or above before we spend a call on it. I'm New York based: US-remote works, and so does on-site in the NYC area — but I'm not relocating or travelling for regular on-site time elsewhere. No need to ask for a résumé first — download it here. If it is easier to talk it through, you can book a call directly on my calendar.
Most reqs reach me as a title rather than a description, so here is the translation. The work I do is usually posted as AI Engineer, AI / LLM Solutions Architect, Forward Deployed Engineer, Agentic AI Engineer, or Staff / Principal Platform Engineer. To be straight about it: I have not held the Forward Deployed Engineer or Solutions Architect title before — my background is staff-level platform and infrastructure engineering at Apple, Google, and Meta, plus current agent-platform work — but those reqs describe what I build: agents, tools, retrieval and MCP integrations against your data, with evaluation and observability around them. Three I'm not the right call for, so you can rule me out fast: reqs where AWS-native architecture is the core skill, ML research or model training, and fractional CTO / Head of Engineering seats where the job is org leadership rather than hands-on building.
Available for contract, retainer, and fractional-staff engineering (NYC / US-remote). Email me, or put a scoping call straight on my calendar — no back-and-forth needed.
maxmawad@gmail.com