Althaf Shaik

About

LLM/RAG-focused engineer who repeatedly takes agentic workflows from impressive demos to dependable production using rigorous evals, SLOs, and deep observability. Has led high-impact incident mitigation (22-minute MTTR during a major sale) and developer enablement workshops, and partnered with sales to close a $410k ARR enterprise deal with a tailored RAG pilot (FastAPI/pgvector/Okta/InfoSec-ready).

Experience

Education

Key Strengths

• Took LLM assistant from prototype to production with explicit SLOs (p95 latency 3.8s -> 1.6s; hallucinations 8% -> <0.8%)
• Built large-scale evaluation infrastructure (12k-ticket gold set, failure-mode labeling, nightly evals, prompt unit tests)
• Designed robust RAG architecture with metadata/freshness controls, citations, schema validation, and safety rules engine
• Strong LLM observability and auditability (end-to-end OpenTelemetry traces with prompts, sources, model versions)
• Operational excellence in real-time incident response (MTTR 22 minutes during major e-commerce sale; error rate 13% -> <1%)
• Performance and reliability engineering under peak load (caching, batching, model routing, autoscaling, admission control)
• Effective enablement via workshops (42 engineers; 95% deployed by end; median time-to-first-query 11 minutes)
• Sales/solutions partnership that closed enterprise deal ($410k ARR) with measurable pilot outcomes and reusable GTM kit