I help founders turn AI-accelerated prototypes into production systems that hold up. Thirty years in software development, twenty-five in applied AI — including a Guinness World Record for distributed chess AI. When the magic runs out, you need someone who can debug a distributed system, spot the architectural mistake, and tell you what will actually break in production. If your prototype was vibe-coded into existence and the foundation feels like a house of cards, that's when we should talk.
The current wave of AI consulting is a gold rush — thick with people who discovered machine learning last year. My first applied-AI work was just over two decades earlier: expert systems at Countrywide in the early 2000s, a Guinness World Record in 2005 for ChessBrain (a distributed chess engine running across 2,070 machines in 50+ countries), and a steady line of production ML since: real-time pose analysis, speech-to-text transcription at scale, RAG pipelines, and LLM infrastructure. Chess is the field AI used to measure itself against; I was building on that side of it.
What that means today: when the AI-accelerated prototype starts hitting its limits, I can debug the distributed system underneath, untangle the architectural shortcut, and tell you which parts of the stack will hold up and which will break under realistic load. If you shipped fast with Cursor, Claude Code, Lovable, or v0 and you're starting to wonder whether the foundation will survive real users — I can tell you what holds up, what needs to be rebuilt, and in what order.
Fractional CTO, technical diligence, board-adjacent advisory, engineering-org design. I've directly reported to CEOs and CTOs at five companies and helped prepare five profitable exits.
For founders and growth-stage teams that need senior judgment without a full-time hire.
Hands-on system design and implementation. Distributed systems, event-driven backends, AI/ML infrastructure, real-time video, IoT. I write production code — 10K+ GitHub commits and counting.
For teams that need a senior engineer who can both design and build the system.
If you shipped a prototype quickly with AI-accelerated tooling and you're worried the foundation won't hold at scale, I can do a senior-eye review — what works, what doesn't, where the landmines are, and what order to fix them in. Thirty years of production software engineering behind the assessment, including hands-on computer vision, speech-to-text, RAG, distributed systems, and video at scale.
For founders who moved fast with AI-assisted development and want a senior read before going further.
If your situation doesn't map cleanly to one of these, tell me anyway — we'll sort it out on the first call.
FlyAnywhere was a live and on-demand fitness video platform streaming to connected bikes nationwide, in direct competition with Peloton. With a team of 20 engineers, built the production studio automation and the video migration infrastructure (Verizon EdgeCast to Akamai during a live outage). The platform ran on Hydra, the microservices framework I created that Flywheel later open-sourced.
FlyAnywhere was selected as one of Oprah's top picks for the 2019 Holiday Season. I subsequently supported the $25M sale of the technology to F45 Training — and was then brought on as F45's SVP of Technology to help prepare for F45's successful 2021 IPO on the NYSE — I was on the floor for the opening bell.
Joined F45 as Global Head of Engineering, reporting to the CTO. Led teams across six locations in four countries — New York, California, Texas, Sydney, the Philippines, and Vietnam — with about a dozen direct reports from Directors through Senior Architects.
Built F45's first AWS EKS Kubernetes cluster and led a platform-wide security upgrade — a new API Gateway and authentication service (Node.js) that now protects every one of the 1,500 studios. Created a container-first local development environment spanning Node.js, PHP, Python, and Dart.
Eighty-four merged PRs (roughly 51,000 lines added) to Moose, an open-source analytical backend framework on ClickHouse and Redis. Focused on taking Moose from a single-instance framework into something that runs reliably across many servers — the coordination layer that lets multiple instances cooperate safely without stepping on each other.
Spearheaded the initial effort to deploy the platform on Kubernetes in Google Cloud, taking Moose from something that runs on a single box to a production-grade deployment spanning a cluster. Also shipped security enhancement features and ran a reliability pass that hardened the framework for real-world use.
Also brought F45 Training in as Fiveonefour's first client — a relationship carried over from my time as F45's SVP of Technology — then joined the delivery team with key code-level contributions to the Lionheart 2.0 launch. The project rebuilt F45's analytics platform on Moose to serve 50K+ daily users and process over a billion biometric data points per week.
The rebuild boosted dev velocity for user-facing analytics by 10×, cut cloud infrastructure costs by more than half, and unlocked a year-long feature backlog. Downstream at F45: +70% member satisfaction, +44% app virality, and 2.5× higher lifetime value among members engaging with the new analytics.
Founded a B2B SaaS platform for martial arts schools, yoga and Pilates studios, dance academies, and physical-therapy practices. Designed the PNX Pose System — server-side AI pose estimation and 3D motion analysis, with real-time skeleton, joint-angle, and center-of-mass overlays. Built SOMA on top: AI-based coaching analysis of 3D movement.
Built PNXPlayer, a CDN-hosted embeddable video player with multi-angle switching, hyper slow-motion, word-synced AI transcripts, and more. Built a 450-document RAG knowledge base on pgvector with hybrid semantic plus full-text search.
World record in distributed AI — ChessBrain ran a global chess engine across 2,070 machines in 50+ countries.
F45 IPO prep. $25M Flywheel sale to F45. Acquisitions of Estate Assist (DocuSign), IGT (GTECH, $6B), inSparq (Adiant).
FlyAnywhere — the connected-fitness platform I led at Flywheel — was selected as one of Oprah's top picks for the 2019 Holiday Season, beating out category leader Peloton.
Applied AI since the early 2000s: expert systems at Countrywide, distributed AI on ChessBrain, today's RAG and LLM infrastructure.
Co-authored titles published by Prentice Hall and Springer. Research in IEEE, ACM/ICGA, IBM developerWorks, O'Reilly.
RedisConf 2018, 2019, 2020 (selected as a best talk). EmpireNode 2016. BoF Linux Conference Copenhagen 2005, keynote.
GitHub commits since 2010, every one handwritten — accumulated long before AI-assisted coding became the norm. Maintainer of Hydra and other open source projects.
Member, Association for Computing Machinery and Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. Member and contributor, Silicon Slopes Technical Community. Redis Stars honoree.
I take on a small number of concurrent engagements. Common shapes: fractional-CTO retainers (a few days a month), fixed-scope builds (three to six months, deliverable-based), and short advisory or diligence work (hours to weeks). We can discuss your needs during our first call.
Based in Salt Lake City, UT. I work remotely by default and travel for kick-offs, on-sites, and the occasional offsite. I've led and collaborated with engineering teams across six countries — the US, Australia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Pakistan, and Ukraine.
Work where the technical problem is genuinely interesting, the team can execute, and the outcome matters. I'll say no when the fit isn't right — it protects both sides.
Thirty minutes by video or phone. No deck. Tell me what you're trying to build or untangle and where you're stuck. I'll tell you whether I can help, whether someone else is a better fit, and what next steps might look like.
The best way to start is a short email with two or three sentences about what you're working on, where you're stuck, and what success would look like. I read every one. If you're in the Salt Lake City area, I'd love to meet up in person.
cjus@ieee.org