I build production AI that earns trust.
I am Petru Arakiss, a Madrid-based AI engineering lead with 20 years in software and machine learning since 2015. I design retrieval, agent runtimes, guardrails, and the evals around language models, and I own them in production inside regulated finance, where wrong output costs money.
background
I lead production AI engineering at Atlax360 across BIFROST, ORVIAN, and Polaris, and I run the frontend platform behind the enterprise product surface. The work is document intelligence, workflow runtimes, and internal assistants, all of it language models treated as product infrastructure inside live financial operations.
Beyond the AI product work I build the platform around it: retrieval systems, agent runtimes, full-stack services, and the harnesses that let coding agents and human engineers work in the same codebase without it turning into noise.
My bias is toward retrieval quality, context assembly, eval loops, traces, and reliability. Most production AI does not break because the model is weak. It breaks because the context is messy, the orchestration is vague, the tools are poorly bounded, and nobody defined what good looks like.
I have worked in machine learning since 2015, starting when TensorFlow landed. The first chatbot I shipped failed basic intent boundaries: ask it about the weather and it tried to sell insurance. Intent boundaries and evaluation were missing, which is most of the job.
Before AI I spent years on full-stack systems for banks and retailers: BBVA, Bankinter, PagoFX, El Corte Inglés, Decathlon. Regulated environments where defects hit money movement and customer data, and release windows did not move.
My day-to-day stack is Python, FastAPI, Next.js, TypeScript, PostgreSQL with pgvector, Supabase, and Redis, with OpenAI and Anthropic APIs when they are the right tool rather than a reflex.
Principles
Build for production from day one
Evidence beats confidence
Documentation is part of the deliverable
Async by default
Design for failure first
Clarity over magic
Selected Experience
Atlax360
4 yrs 8 mosAI Engineering Lead
I lead production AI engineering across BIFROST, ORVIAN, and Polaris under a dual-leadership mandate (AI and Frontend Platform). I own the entire loop: retrieval quality, deterministic runtime behaviors, strict evaluation, observability traces, and cost controls.
Head of Frontend Platform
I lead the frontend platform behind Unicron, Atlax360's enterprise data product. The work is architecture, standards, component systems, and turning backend complexity into interfaces people can operate without guessing.
Sopra Steria
2 yrs 6 mosBBVA | Frontend Lead Architect
via BBVAI designed and implemented frontend scalability and performance patterns for BBVA. I built with Lit and Web Components in a banking environment where constraints were real and mistakes were expensive.
SOLUNION | Frontend Lead Architect
via SOLUNIONI rewrote legacy frontend systems into a modular React application, preserving the working domain behavior from the old system and removing the architecture that blocked further change.
PagoFX | Backend Lead Architect
via PagoFX (Santander)I led a 12-person team building backend infrastructure from scratch for PagoFX. I worked on bank integrations, SWIFT constraints, and APIs that had to behave like financial software under real constraints.
Bankinter | Frontend Lead Architect
via BankinterI led a 20-person team through a complete Bankinter Angular monolith rewrite. I built a DDD-based architecture in Angular 8, pushed on review quality, and spent a lot of time turning a large frontend into something that could keep growing without collapsing.
Stack
- TypeScript
- Python
- Rust
- JavaScript
- SQL
- Retrieval-Augmented Generation
- Semantic Search
- Vector Databases
- Qdrant
- PostgreSQL/pgvector
- Evaluation loops
- React
- Next.js
- TypeScript
- Web Components
- Lit.js
Earlier Work
knowmad mood
10 mosEl Corte Inglés | Backend Lead Architect via El Corte Inglés
Profile Software Services
1 yr 1 moDecathlon España | Frontend Lead Architect via Decathlon España
Relevant Traffic
9 mosPullmantur | Full Stack Engineer via Pullmantur
Dimensional Webs
4 yrs 8 mosFull Stack Engineer
Gran Via 80
6 yrs 3 mosFull Stack Web Developer
Education
Instituto Salvador Allende
2005 - 2006Computer and Network Systems Operator
Professional Training Program, Computer Science
Focused on UNIX and Windows systems, TCP/IP, system administration, Assembly for PIC, and Pascal as the first serious programming language.
Eftimie Murgu University
Sep 1997 - Jun 2000Program of Initiation in Computing
Pascal, operating systems, hardware basics, and early HTML and CSS for Netscape Navigator.
routing
petruarakiss is the personal track: employment conversations, writing, open source, and public engineering work.