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, 30 hrs/week from $19,500/mo, 40 hrs/week from $26,000/mo. Every tier is the same floor — just tell me the weekly hours you need.
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, 20 hrs/week from $13,000/mo, 30 hrs/week from $19,500/mo, and 40 hrs/week from $26,000/mo. Every tier is the same $150/hr floor, including near-full-time contract engagements — tell me the weekly hours you need 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 scoping call — the calendar books a 30-minute slot — then agree scope and rate in writing before any work begins.
Happy to hear from you. Four things in your first email, and I can tell you yes or no without a call:
No need to ask for a résumé first — download it here. To send all four in one go, open a pre-filled email. If it is easier to talk it through, you can book a call directly on my calendar.
Right-to-represent forms are worth discussing once the end client and the approved rate are in writing — until then there’s nothing to be exclusive about, and signing blind is how a candidate ends up double-submitted and dropped by both pipelines. One practical note: if the rate line in your RTR is still an unfilled template field, fill it in before sending — a blank number isn’t something I can agree to.
Two things I won’t send by email at submission stage: my Social Security number, in full or last four, and my date of birth. Identity and tax paperwork belongs at onboarding, in your compliance system, once an engagement is actually agreed — I’m glad to complete it there. A first email asking for either gets this answer rather than the details, so it saves us both a round trip to leave them out.
I’m authorized to work in the US. It’s the first screening question on most reqs, so it’s here up front rather than three emails in.
What I won’t put on a public page is my visa category, and I won’t email immigration documents at submission stage — the same boundary as the Social Security number and date of birth above. That’s onboarding-stage compliance paperwork and I’m glad to complete it in your system once an engagement is agreed. If your req carries a requirement beyond general work authorization — a specific status, or a clearance — say so in your first email and I’ll tell you straight away whether it’s a no.
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.
Contract and fractional is the focus, and everything above is written for it — but full-time is genuinely on the table for the right remote role. If you're holding a permanent req and were about to move on because this page says "contract," don't. The terms are different from the hourly ones: fully-remote full-time, $150–200K base; NYC in-person, $200K+. Location is the one thing that doesn't move either way — NYC or fully remote, and I'm not relocating. Send the band and the remote policy in your first email and I'll tell you straight away whether it works.
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