Accelerate Your Roadmap
Ship faster and scale without building a fragile house of cards. We provide the senior technical execution and infrastructure expertise needed to unblock your team and get your AI features to production.
Track record includes engineering leadership at Wildlife Studios, Prota Games, and high-growth AI startups
15+
Years Experience
PhD
Computer Science
2x
CTO
4
Production AI Platforms
We solve the critical technical bottlenecks that prevent high-growth startups from scaling.
Stalled Product Roadmaps
Your core engineering team is overwhelmed, making it difficult to ship new AI features quickly without sacrificing quality.
→ Senior, hands-on execution. We embed directly with your team to clear bottlenecks and accelerate your delivery timeline.
Textbook Over-Engineering
Less experienced teams often default to hype-driven solutions or textbook 'best practices' that ignore your startup's actual constraints.
→ Pragmatic, battle-hardened judgment. We navigate complex trade-offs across AI and infrastructure to make the right choices for your specific context.
Runway-Draining Hires
Hiring a full-time Principal Engineer takes months of recruiting and costs $400k+, burning through vital runway.
→ Immediate technical leadership and execution at a fraction of the cost, scaling up or down with your exact needs.
Predictable engagement models designed to deliver strategic arbitration and execution without the runway-burning costs of a full-time executive.
Staff augmentation for AI engineering and full-stack development. Seamless integration with your existing team.
Hourly Rate
Hands-on implementation of Agentic Platforms, scalable backend infrastructure, and MLOps pipelines.
Weekly or Fixed Price
Strategic leadership, engineering culture development, hiring support, and roadmap alignment.
Monthly Retainer
Recent engagements across agentic platforms, embedded AI engineering, and technical leadership.
AI startup
Integrated directly with the core team as an independent contractor to engineer AI solutions and develop critical platform features.
Result: Accelerated product delivery and maintained seamless alignment with internal engineering standards on an hourly execution model.
Fintech
Hands-on construction of a multi-agent platform designed to automate complex B2B credit analysis and collateral structuring.
Result: Engineered the complete platform architecture and MVP from scratch, establishing the foundation for the company's automated proprietary risk intelligence.
Media-tech
Served as CTO while personally engineering a high-scale agentic GenAI pipeline using Python and AWS to automate video rendering and AI dubbing workflows.
Result: Enabled a 50% reduction in localization overhead, allowing the studio to scale content globally with minimal manual intervention.
Lucas Machado — PhD-level Software Architect with 15+ years of experience, specialized in building global-scale platforms that leverage AI to deliver direct business value.
The trajectory bridges the gap between deep technical research (PhD in Computer Science, PUC-Rio) and executive vision (former 2x CTO). Recent work includes engineering agentic GenAI pipelines that reduced localization costs by 50% at Prota Games, and building a high-scale MLOps platform that delivered a ~15% uplift in LTV for games with millions of daily active users at Wildlife Studios.
Currently available for embedded AI engineering, project-based builds, and fractional CTO engagements. Whether you need to ship your first agentic feature or scale an existing AI platform, the goal is always the same: pragmatic decisions, clean execution, and measurable business impact.
Have a project in mind? Let's talk.