OPEN TO FULL-TIME ROLES

Alejandro Morales · AI Engineer

I build production AI systems, from the storage engine to the model.

Relational database written from scratch in Rust.

Open to full-time work as a Forward-Deployed Engineer or Applied AI Engineer. I embed with a team, learn how they actually work, and ship the system that replaces the manual process.

Why hire meGet in touch

Available for contract work →

6 products live, in daily use by

PTO Ski & SnowboardingFettiTableSharpCannaTrack Enterprise

Latest writing · 15 days agoIdempotency: The Skill That Quietly Separates Senior Engineers →

LATEST LAUNCH

Fettifetti.tips

Money tracker for cash workers: shift logs, receipt OCR, tax math. Live.

Products Shipped

Industries

Live Products

SELECTED WORK

Selected Work

The work a hiring manager can evaluate directly: read the code, run the live products.

github.com/alemorale7777/ferrodb

FerroDB

Systems

OPEN SOURCE

FerroDB

A relational database built from scratch in Rust — now AI-native with an HNSW vector index

A relational database written from scratch in Rust — page-based storage with checksums, a buffer pool, B+-tree indexes, write-ahead logging that survives crash-injection tests, MVCC snapshot isolation, a System-R-style cost-based optimizer with EXPLAIN, and enough of the PostgreSQL wire protocol that a real psql client connects. Its ninth milestone makes it AI-native: an HNSW approximate-nearest-neighbor index with filtered k-NN search and hand-written AVX2 SIMD distance kernels. Public on GitHub with green CI, a 122-test suite, a published architecture book, and a live WebAssembly playground.

RustHNSW vector indexSIMD / AVX2MVCCB+-treeWAL+2

Case study→

powderledger.com

PowderLedger

SaaS

LIVE USERS

PowderLedger

Ski & Snowboard Rental Management

Full-stack rental shop management platform with ISO 11088 DIN calculator, real-time inventory, service center kanban board, QR scan & check-in with live camera, multi-tenant architecture, and analytics dashboard. Currently in active use at PTO Ski & Snowboarding.

Next.jsPrismaNeonNextAuthTailwindTypeScript+1

Case study→Visit Site

Fetti

FinTech

LIVE

Fetti

Money Tracker for Cash Workers — receipt OCR on Anthropic vision

Mobile-first PWA for cash-income workers — servers, bartenders, valets, dancers, drivers, and stylists. Shift logging, expense tracking with receipt OCR, tax estimation, and a goal-driven retention loop that turns financial visibility into a daily habit. Live at fetti.tips.

Next.jsPrismaNeonStripeNextAuthResend+1

Case study→Visit Site

tablesharp.com

TableSharp

Gaming

LAUNCHING

TableSharp

Casino Strategy Trainer

Comprehensive casino strategy training platform covering blackjack with card counting, craps, video poker, roulette, baccarat, and poker. Features a closed-loop Train → Play → Track → Analyze system with a proprietary 'Money Saved' metric as the primary retention hook.

Next.jsTypeScriptPrismaNeonStripeVercel

Case study→Visit Site

ENTERPRISE

CannaTrack

Cannabis Distribution Management

Next.jsReactPrismaNeon+1

COMPLIANCECase study→

BUILT

Justice Ledger

Legal Practice Management SaaS — dual Anthropic + OpenAI legal research

Next.js 16PrismaNeonNextAuth+4

SAASCase study→

DEPLOYED

THRAXON

2D Strategy Conquest Game

React NativeExpoCanvas APIVercel

GAME DEVCase study→

IN DEV

SOLTIDE

F2P Mobile Farming RPG

Unity 6.3 LTSC#2.5D Isometric

GAME DEVCase study→

DELIVERED

Client Wedding Website

Production Freelance Project

Next.jsPrismaNeonVercel+1

FREELANCECase study→

FORWARD-DEPLOYED DELIVERYPowderLedger

Ski & snowboard rental shop · Beaverton, OR

I embedded with PTO Ski & Snowboarding's rental-floor workflow and replaced paper forms, manual DIN charts, and four separate tools with one system in daily use. This is the job a Forward-Deployed Engineer does.

BEFOREPaper forms + manual DIN charts + four separate tools

AFTEROne unified platform · ISO 11088 compliance · live camera QR check-in

Replaced spreadsheets, calculators, paper intake, and service tracker with one app
ISO 11088 DIN calculator removes a binding-safety liability that was on staff before
In daily use at PTO Ski & Snowboarding, handling real customer check-ins and inventory

BEFORE SOFTWARE

Six years in operations management before I wrote software, leading a 12-person team in cannabis, one of the most heavily regulated industries there is. Seed-to-sale tracking, state compliance, and audit trails were the daily job. That is why I can walk into a client's operation and read what they actually need, versus what they said they need. When I later built CannaTrack, a compliance system for that same industry, I was building for a floor I had already run. Forward-deployed engineering is that job: embed, learn the constraints, and remove the manual process.

WRITING

Latest Writing

How I think about building with AI: the trade-offs, not the hype.

July 9, 2026

Retrieval, Measured: Where RAG Actually Breaks

Most RAG failures are retrieval failures, not generation failures. A framework-free evaluation ladder on HotpotQA quantifies exactly where, with real keyless numbers you can reproduce.

10 min readRead→

June 28, 2026

Prompt Engineering Is Now a Subset of a Bigger Job

The craft moved from wording one message to curating the whole context window. Why reasoning models inverted the old prompting advice — 'think step by step' and few-shot can now hurt — and the disciplines that replaced clever wording.

14 min readRead→

June 13, 2026

ChatGPT vs Claude vs Gemini vs Copilot vs Meta AI: A Developer's Honest 2026 Comparison

A primary-sourced, June-2026 comparison of ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, GitHub Copilot, and Meta AI — real strengths, real weaknesses, models, context windows, pricing, and which to use for coding, writing, multimodal, and research. From a developer who ships with them.

17 min readRead→

View all posts

BY THE NUMBERS

Track Record

8Products Shippedacross 5 industries

6Live Productsserving real users today

2–6Weeks to Shipprototype to production

AIBuilt Inagents · RAG · evals

CLIENT FEEDBACK

“We went from paper forms and manual DIN calculations to a complete digital rental operation. Check-ins are faster, our inventory is tracked in real time, and the whole team was up and running on day one. PowderLedger runs our entire shop now.”

Rental Operations Team

PTO Ski & Snowboarding · Beaverton, OR

PTO Ski & Snowboarding✦Fetti✦TableSharp✦CannaTrack Enterprise✦Heather & Joe Wedding✦Justice Ledger SaaS✦THRAXON Strategy Game✦SOLTIDE Mobile RPG✦PTO Ski & Snowboarding✦Fetti✦TableSharp✦CannaTrack Enterprise✦Heather & Joe Wedding✦Justice Ledger SaaS✦THRAXON Strategy Game✦SOLTIDE Mobile RPG✦

WHY HIRE ME

How I Work

I own the whole path: architecture, implementation, evals, and deploy. I write the spec before the code and document the decisions the model could not make.

SPEC FIRST

I write the spec before the code

Before I write code, I document the features, the data model, and the edge cases, and we agree on the spec. The build matches the spec, and the decisions get written down so the next person inherits the reasoning, not just the diff.

END TO END

I ship end to end

I take a system from schema to production: auth, data model, the frontend, and the deploy. I care as much about the parts that are not glamorous, the eval harness, the failure analysis, and the fallbacks, as the demo.

DOMAIN FIRST

I read the domain, not just the ticket

Six years running operations taught me to scope from how the work actually happens, not from a feature list handed down. I ask what breaks on the floor before I build, which is the core of forward-deployed work.

8production applications shipped, 6 in daily use. Systems people run, not demos.

WHAT I CAN BUILD

What I Can Build

SaaS platforms, LLM-integrated products, PWAs, fintech, dashboards, and APIs. From a single AI feature to a full production system.

SaaS Platforms

A complete platform your customers pay for: subscriptions, dashboards, and user management, with the data model and auth done properly

AI-Powered Products

Make your product smarter: AI that answers questions, automates repetitive work, and keeps users coming back

Mobile PWAs

A mobile app experience without the app store: installs to the home screen and works offline

FinTech Apps

Handle money the right way: payments, income tracking, tax estimation, and full Stripe integration

Admin Dashboards

See your entire operation at a glance: real-time data, action boards, and reports that drive decisions

APIs & Backends

The engine behind your product: typed, tested, and built to handle real production traffic

PROCESS

How I Build

01DESIGN

Design & Architect

Define the problem, map the user journey, design the database schema, plan the API surface. Every project starts with a clear architecture before a single line of code.

Product StrategySchema DesignAPI PlanningUser Flows

02DEVELOP

Build with AI

Claude Code as a pair programmer. Master prompts for specification. Multi-agent workflows for implementation, with verification gates that keep the output honest. AI handles the repetitive work so I can spend my time on architecture, evals, and the decisions an AI can’t make.

Claude CodeMaster PromptsNext.jsTypeScript

03DEPLOY

Ship & Iterate

Push to production on Vercel with CI/CD. Every commit auto-deploys. Real users, real feedback, rapid iteration. A product isn't done when it's built. It's done when it's serving people.

Vercel CI/CDAnalyticsUser TestingIteration

TECH I USE DAILY

Next.js

React

TypeScript

Prisma

Neon

Tailwind

Vercel

Stripe

NextAuth

Unity 6.3 LTS

ALSO AVAILABLE FOR CONTRACT

Full-time is the goal, but I also take on contract builds. The protections and services below are for contract work.

HOW YOU'RE PROTECTED

Milestone-based paymentsYou see real progress before each payment clears.

Source code always yoursFull IP assignment on delivery: your repo, your domain.

Clear scope up frontNo PDF contracts, no surprise invoices, no scope creep.

24-hour replyYou email today, you get a real answer tomorrow.

CONTRACT SERVICES

How We Work Together

Four clear ways I can help, from a full SaaS build to an architecture review. Milestone-based delivery means you see real progress at every step.

Full-Stack SaaS Development

End-to-end web applications

Auth, payments, dashboard, multi-tenant — wired up day one
Production-ready Vercel deploy with CI/CD and previews
You ship in 2–6 weeks; you own the code, the repo, the database

2–6 weeks

Details→

AI-Augmented Development

Team-scale output, verification-gated

The output of a small team — with verification gates that keep AI-generated code honest, not vibes.
Working MVP in days, not sprints — Claude Code in the loop
Master prompt + AI test coverage handed off for your team

1–4 weeks

Details→