about

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

01

Build for production from day one

02

Evidence beats confidence

03

Documentation is part of the deliverable

04

Async by default

05

Design for failure first

06

Clarity over magic

Selected Experience

Atlax360

4 yrs 8 mos

AI 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 mos

BBVA | Frontend Lead Architect

via BBVA

I 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 SOLUNION

I 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 Bankinter

I 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

Backend
  • TypeScript
  • Python
  • Rust
  • JavaScript
  • SQL
AI / ML
  • Retrieval-Augmented Generation
  • Semantic Search
  • Vector Databases
  • Qdrant
  • PostgreSQL/pgvector
  • Evaluation loops
Frontend
  • React
  • Next.js
  • TypeScript
  • Web Components
  • Lit.js

Earlier Work

knowmad mood

10 mos

El Corte Inglés | Backend Lead Architect via El Corte Inglés

Profile Software Services

1 yr 1 mo

Decathlon España | Frontend Lead Architect via Decathlon España

Relevant Traffic

9 mos

Pullmantur | Full Stack Engineer via Pullmantur

Dimensional Webs

4 yrs 8 mos

Full Stack Engineer

Gran Via 80

6 yrs 3 mos

Full Stack Web Developer

Education

Instituto Salvador Allende

2005 - 2006

Computer 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 2000

Program 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.

Contact