What I Actually Build: AI Systems That Ship, Not Demos That Impress

Every LinkedIn post about AI sounds the same. "Excited to leverage cutting-edge LLMs to transform your business." Cool. What does that even mean? I'll tell you what I actually do. AI Engineering — Not the Buzzword Version I build AI systems that run in production. Not prototypes that break when you look at them wrong. RAG Systems: Retrieval-Augmented Generation is where I spend most of my time. Real RAG — not just "stuff everything into a vector store and pray." I design chunking strategies, retrieval pipelines, re-ranking layers, and evaluation frameworks. The stuff that makes the difference between a chatbot that hallucinates and one that gives you the right answer every time. I've shipped RAG systems across banking, humanitarian operations, and eCommerce. Each domain has different tolerance for hallucination. Banking: zero. Humanitarian: lives depend on it. eCommerce: your customer service team will revolt. AI Agents: Not the "look, my agent can use a calculator"