Erik Engelen

20 years shipping software in regulated banking and insurance — now architecting production AI platforms I run end-to-end.

I build production AI platforms and then run them — real users, real money, real 2 a.m. pages. MCP-native, on infrastructure I operate myself.

Open to a permanent AI Architect / Staff Applied AI Engineer role, EU remote · Leuven, BE

Talk to me about a role

AngelsWorks — Independent AI Architect, 2020–present

On a CV the two halves look like different jobs. In practice they're the same one: ship it, operate it, don't break the thing that's already running.

In production · real money

Tenant Manager — an MCP-native SaaS a real landlord runs their business on.

Real money moves through it via Stripe. 48 MCP tools, 80 tables, and 74 migrations shipped with zero downtime and no data lost. Belgian rental law modelled as a first-class domain — GDPR deletion, CSRF, MFA, per-org SMTP — the boring, load-bearing work nobody does for a toy.

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Evaluation · cost discipline

ArtLens — judgment you can put a number on.

Haiku primary, Opus only on uncertainty: a 70% cost cut at 87–93% accuracy on cutout images. Forced-choice VLM prompting, and comparative judging — because absolute scores are useless, everything scores 90. A self-training loop where three independent corroborations auto-promote an element into the diagnostic library.

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Operated, not just built

AngelsWorks Hub — the platform underneath, and the discipline of running it.

One LLM gateway, seven tiers, multi-provider routing with self-healing circuit-breaker fallback across 12+ providers — fallback that has held through provider outages with zero downtime. Cost-disciplined and observable. A strangler-fig migration run on a live platform, without breaking the running thing.

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Before the AI · regulated enterprise

Twenty years shipping and operating software where “just rewrite it” was never an option.

KBC, AG Insurance, Electrabel. I led the SharePoint development team at Electrabel, owned a 30,000-user collaboration platform, introduced continuous integration, and coached eight junior engineers — three written references on file. At AG Insurance I tracked down and fixed a two-year-old production bug the team had learned to work around.

What I'm looking for

A permanent AI Architect / Staff Applied AI Engineer role, EU remote.

On a team that owns its AI platform — routing, evaluation, prompts, agent boundaries and data visible and revisable, not hidden behind a vendor's roadmap. I'll tell you what's done and what isn't — ask me about the test coverage I haven't written yet.

Let's talk.

Permanent AI Architect / Staff Applied AI Engineer, EU remote. Email, LinkedIn, or grab 30 minutes.