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AIsystemsteams can own.
I’m Donald B. Havery, an Applied AI / AI Systems Engineer. I take frontier models and build the system that makes them ship: orchestration, grounding, evaluation, and a runtime you can actually trust.
Who I am
A systems engineer, not a model researcher.
The distinction matters. I don’t train foundation models, run research, or tune weights. That’s a different discipline. I build around the model: the agentic loops, retrieval, evals, MCP tooling, security checks, and handoffs that turn a raw model into a product a team can run.
The shape of the work is Forward-Deployed: sit close to a real problem, build a thin slice that runs in days, prove it against real data, and harden it into something boring to operate. Models are commodities now. The durable value is in the engineering that sits between the model and a thing you can hand to a user.
I choose the runtime to fit the job. Sometimes that is a hosted frontier model, sometimes local inference, sometimes a hybrid path. The constant is operational discipline: privacy, cost, latency, security, and a system the owner can maintain after handoff.
How I work
Four principles I don’t bend on.
They’re the difference between a system that demos and one you can leave running.
Right runtime for the job
Cloud, local, or hybrid is a design decision, not a slogan. Privacy, latency, cost, and the team’s ability to operate it decide the architecture.
Evals before polish
Non-deterministic systems need tests too. Golden sets and quality gates go in early, so every later change is measured rather than guessed at.
A real slice, fast
A thin end-to-end path running in days (real data, real model, real output), so we react to something live instead of arguing over a spec.
Make it boring to run
Graceful fallback, observability and cost discipline. The goal is a system you can leave running unattended, not a demo that needs a babysitter.
Stack
The tools I reach for.
Chosen for what ships and holds up, not for what’s trending.
Credentials
Education & certifications.
Education
Delivery signals
Have a model-shaped problem? Let’s make it ship.
Tell me the outcome you’re after. I’ll tell you what’s buildable, what it takes, and where the model actually helps.