Principal AI Product & LLM Engineer

25-year design-led product builder with an Apple Design Award (2003, Tubatomic, commercial work for Warner Bros, HGTV, Turner). Successfully ran Hoff & Pepper hot sauce for 10 years (1M bottles, 5,000 retail doors, Hot Ones S16) before winding it down. In the past 12 months, shipped Steadcast (native macOS podcast app) and its Knowledge Engine, featuring queue-based Whisper on a self-hosted RTX 3060 (17.9x realtime), a 410-rule editorial voice guide, Promptfoo eval gates, mixture-of-models routing (Llama 3.3 for structured extraction, GLM-5.1 for prose), cost ceilings, monitoring, and soak windows. Best fit for AI features that need to actually work in production, non-technical founders burned by agencies, CPG/DTC operators seeking an operator-builder, not a consultant, and fractional Product Lead engagements.