Rene Persau
I'm a senior engineer with 7+ years shipping production AI, ML and data systems in fast-moving startups.
I came to engineering from the business side: a business degree in Stuttgart, a master's in high-tech entrepreneurship in Barcelona, then advising companies on data strategy in Copenhagen. From there I moved into building: I joined Perlego in London as a junior data scientist, built their first data platform as an early data hire, and left as a senior engineer.
Since then the work has moved up the stack to AI: an evaluation framework and a $350K MRR AI product at Spotlight, and production agents with guardrails at Midnite, including a multi-agent fraud detection system. I build multi-agent systems, RAG workflows, tool integrations and the eval layer underneath them, hands-on in Python, Go, TypeScript, AWS and MLOps.
Most of the work arrives the same way: an agent prototype that impressed everyone in a demo and then failed on the requests users actually make. I take those systems, put measurement underneath them, and rebuild the parts the numbers say are broken. What I care about is AI that is safe, observable and useful to real users.
Based in San Francisco, working remotely across EU and US hours. Currently taking on a small number of builds and audits.
- production AI, ML & data
- 7+ yrs
- remote, eu & us hours
- san francisco
- working languages
- english · german
- open for Q4 2026
- 2 slots
What I'm good at, specifically
Agents that survive real users
Agents that pull from documents, threads and databases and act through real tools, with every answer and action traceable to its source.
Evaluation as engineering
Golden sets, regression gates, tracing. Treating model behaviour as something you test in CI rather than something you feel out in review.
Working inside a team
PRs your engineers review, decisions written down, and a handover session rather than a document dump on the last day.
Where I've done it
- Apr 2025 - presentLondon → San Francisco
Midnite
Senior Data EngineerProduction LLM agents with guardrails for analytics and research teams, and a multi-agent fraud detection system, evaluated against internal and regulator policy, that cut processing time by 80%.
- Feb 2024 - Apr 2025London
Spotlight
Senior Data Engineer · Data, AI & MLBuilt the evaluation framework the team used to regression test prompts and RAG pipelines, and an AI service for casting scripts that became a paid product at $350K MRR.
- Aug 2019 - Jan 2024London
Perlego
Jr. Data Scientist → Data Engineer → Senior Data EngineerEarly data hire. Built the first data platform and data lake, an MLOps platform on SageMaker, and the recommendation, churn and user classification models that ran on it.
- Jul 2018 - Aug 2019Copenhagen
Rainmaking Innovation
Data Strategy ConsultantAdvised corporate clients on data strategy and architecture, and built ML foundations with their teams: feature stores, model versioning, inference endpoints.
- M.Sc. High-Tech EntrepreneurshipHarbour.Space University, Barcelona · 2017 - 2018
- B.A. Business AdministrationHFT Stuttgart · 2012 - 2016
- AWS Solutions Architect - Associate
- AWS Developer - Associate
- Udacity Cloud DevOps Engineer
- JHU Data Science: Statistics & ML
Want the short version on a call?
One hour on your data, your users and the failure you're seeing. You leave with an opinion whether or not we work together.