Home/Case Studies

What Privian
has actually built.

Anonymized engagement stories. Industry, problem, what we did, what shipped, what changed. New consulting work is just getting started. These draw from earlier roles where Sid played the same kind of part. New cases will be added as engagements close.

Currently published

A first set of engagement profiles.

Each case follows the same shape: who they were, what was broken, what we built, what shipped. Two-week to six-month engagements unless noted. Client names are withheld; industry and scale are accurate.

F100 Financial Services · Cloud + IaC · 9 months

Self-service cloud across forty business units.

A top-five US bank needed every business unit to provision cloud resources without filing a ticket, but also without going around audit, security, or FinOps. We architected the IaC + policy layer that made that possible, and rolled it out across forty BUs.

ProblemTicket-driven cloud provisioning was a six-week SLA. Teams were sneaking around it. Audit was unhappy.
BuiltTerraform module catalog, policy-as-code guardrails, self-service portal, plan-on-PR / apply-on-merge CI, OPA-enforced cost & security policies.
ShippedMean time-to-provision dropped from 6 weeks to 2 hours. Audit got more visibility, not less. Forty BUs migrated in nine months.
EngagementEmbedded as Office of the CTO. Fractional + scoped delivery.

Series-A AI Startup · Fractional CTO · 6 months

From notebook to production AI product.

An AI startup with a working prototype-in-a-notebook and a Series A in the bank, but no senior engineer to turn the prototype into a multi-tenant SaaS. We came in as fractional CTO and got it to a place a full-time VP Eng could run.

ProblemPromising AI feature, customers waiting, founders couldn't ship past the demo. Multi-tenancy, auth, evals, and prompt versioning were all unsolved.
BuiltAWS-native stack (API Gateway / Lambda / Cognito / RDS+pgvector / Bedrock). Row-level multi-tenancy. Eval harness in CI. Prompt-as-code with feature flags + rollback.
ShippedFirst three paying customers onboarded inside the engagement. VP Eng hired and ramped before exit. Founders kept their seats in technical investor conversations.
EngagementFractional CTO · ~12 hrs/wk · handed off cleanly.

Regional Education · AI Readiness · 3 weeks

Reading the room before spending a dollar on AI.

A regional educational organization was being pitched AI tools every week. The board wanted to "do something with AI." Staff were exhausted and the data was a mess. We ran a fixed-scope AI Readiness Assessment.

ProblemVendor noise, board pressure, an underlying data layer nobody had audited in five years. No clear answer on what to do, what to skip, or what to fix first.
BuiltDiagnostic across four pillars: data, infrastructure, team capability, organizational goals. Written report. Sequencing playbook for 90 days, 6 months, 12 months.
ShippedBoard approved a sequenced plan that started with a data-quality cleanup and a single low-risk pilot, not the all-in vendor commitment they'd been leaning toward.
EngagementAI Readiness Assessment · 3 weeks · fixed price.

Mid-Market SaaS · Cloud Modernization · 4 months

Moving off VMware without losing the team.

A mid-market SaaS company was running on aging VMware infrastructure, paying renewal prices that had doubled, and a platform team that had only ever known vSphere. We architected and executed the migration to AWS without losing a single engineer.

ProblemRenewal sticker shock. Engineering velocity throttled by infra. Platform team scared of being made obsolete.
BuiltPhased AWS migration plan. Terraform modules that gave the platform team ownership of the new world. Hands-on pairing sessions to level them up on cloud-native patterns.
ShippedProduction workloads migrated in 4 months. Annual infra cost down 38%. Platform team retained, and two of them promoted.
EngagementScoped Project + Fractional SE handoff.

More coming

Engagements we're working on now.

New case studies are published as engagements close and clients approve the framing. Reach out if you want to talk to a recent client directly. We can usually arrange it.

In progress

RAG pipeline rescue: enterprise legal

Inherited a RAG implementation that wasn't returning the right context. Diagnosing the chunking + retrieval layer and rebuilding around hybrid search.

In progress

Local-first AI build-out: Florida small business

Mac Studio in the back office, custom document workflows, no vendor in the loop. The whole stack on the desk.

In progress

Multi-tenant agent crew: B2B SaaS

Adding agentic capability to an existing product, with per-tenant policy enforcement via MCP + OPA.

In progress

Pre-Series A technical DD: PE-led acquisition

Independent technical due diligence on an AI-forward acquisition target. Architecture, team, code-quality, and roadmap assessment.

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