Agentic Platforms for Founders and AI-Native Teams
From using a frontier model to actually improving your business, a lot of hard problems need to be solved. That's what we do.
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
The critical technical bottlenecks that keep founders and AI-native teams from shipping.
The Vibe-Coded Reckoning
AI tools shipped your MVP fast. Then it stops scaling: every new feature breaks something else, security debt surfaces at the worst time, and infra bills outpace revenue.
→ A principal engineer who can extend what's there — not rewrite it. Features ship again, security debt gets paid down, infra costs come back in line.
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 and costs $400k+ — burning runway while the frontier keeps moving without you.
→ Immediate principal-engineer execution at a fraction of the cost. AI applied to your business this quarter, not after a six-month hire.
Predictable engagement models designed to deliver strategic arbitration and execution without the runway-burning costs of a full-time executive.
AI applied to the business processes that matter — improving cost, throughput, quality, and time-to-market on multiple fronts. Production systems your team owns. Agentic systems and GenAI pipelines.
Weekly or Fixed Price
Strategic leadership, engineering culture development, hiring support, and roadmap alignment.
Monthly Retainer
AI applied to real business processes — across fintech, AI startups, and media-tech.
YC-backed AI startup
Embedded with the founder as principal AI engineer. Owns the hardest AI problems in the product — designs, builds, ships, and stays accountable for what runs.
Result: AI features at the heart of the product.
Fintech
Hands-on construction of a multi-agent platform designed to automate complex B2B credit analysis and collateral structuring.
Result: Replaced manual analyst hours with automated multi-agent credit analysis — letting the company evaluate more deals, faster, without scaling headcount.
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 is a principal engineer and founder of NeoQuest. PhD in Computer Science from PUC-Rio, 2x CTO (Prota Games, Mobjoy Games), and ex-Wildlife Studios — where he was the first engineer on the ML platform serving millions of daily players.
NeoQuest applies AI to the business processes that matter — cost down, throughput up, quality up, on multiple fronts at once. The agents do the heavy lifting. He handles the judgment — specs, architecture, code review, and accountability for what runs in production.
Recent engagements: Marvin (fintech) — built a multi-agent platform from scratch to automate B2B credit analysis and collateral structuring. Inventory Quant (AI startup) — embedded with the core team to ship AI features and platform work. Prota Games (media tech) — engineered a GenAI pipeline that cut localization overhead by 50%.
Based in São Paulo, on US business hours. Currently taking on a small number of new engagements per quarter.
Have a project in mind? Let's talk.