Consulting

Eudemonia, LLC

Fractional applied-AI and backend engineering. I ship production LLM and agent features and modernize backend systems for a small number of clients at a time, part-time and remote from Houston, on US Central time.

I have consulted under the Eudemonia name since 2014, alongside full-time engineering roles until 2026, and incorporated it as Eudemonia, LLC in 2022. It is my full-time work now. I am a staff-level engineer with fourteen years on production systems, most recently six years at Better.com, where I led document-automation AI at a public mortgage lender and launched its first borrower-facing mobile app. On my own time I design and run Adjunct, a self-hosted platform where AI coding agents do real engineering work under human authority. Clients get senior judgment and working software, not a slide deck.

What I take on

  1. Your first LLM or agent feature, shipped. From “we should do something with AI” to a feature in production: scoping, prompt and agent architecture, evaluation, guardrails, observability. Typically four to eight weeks, part-time.
  2. Agent and AI architecture. A design review or a roadmap for an agentic system: orchestration, human-approval gates, evaluation strategy, cost control, the failure modes I have already hit. One to two weeks, or an ongoing retainer.
  3. Full-stack modernization. Rails, Node and Python systems: upgrades, performance, reliability, and integrations such as payments, document processing and messaging APIs. Ongoing fractional work.

Proof

  • Document-automation AI, led. Bulk document intake and LLM extraction for mortgage underwriting at Better.com, taken through three architectural generations under public-company audit. A production holdout measured the machine against the human processors and set the automation policy per document type; W-2 turnaround went from ten hours to twelve minutes.
  • Conversational AI in production. Contributed to a voice, chat and SMS agent that takes borrowers through pre-approval, and to an underwriting assistant grounded in agency rules.
  • A multi-agent platform of my own. An orchestration kernel in TypeScript and Postgres, an engineering workflow engine, and a policy-gated broker for side effects, running seven agent lanes on a home Kubernetes cluster under GitOps. More than 3,600 pull requests have merged through it, each behind adversarial review and a human approval gate.
  • Zero to one. Better's first borrower-facing mobile app, from an empty repository to iOS and Android, growing the team from one engineer to six.
  • E-commerce, ongoing. A Spree Commerce platform on Rails, ActiveAdmin, React and PostgreSQL that I have developed and operated for a client since 2019.

Stack

Ruby on Rails, TypeScript and Node, Go, Python. LangGraph, MCP, the OpenAI and Anthropic APIs, Claude Code. React and React Native. PostgreSQL, Kafka, AWS and GCP, Docker and Kubernetes.

How I work

Outcome first: a clear MVP, honest trade-offs, and production habits from day one, meaning tests, observability, runbooks and post-mortems. Async by default, comfortable owning an ambiguous problem end to end with little ceremony. I keep the number of engagements small so each one gets real attention.

Get in touch

Booking part-time engagements now. Write to jared@clifton-lee.com or find me on LinkedIn. Eudemonia, LLC is a Delaware company, incorporated in 2022.