Consulting · 03

Fractional Principal Cloud & AI Architect

Senior architecture judgement for your team, without a full-time hire.

Duration: Minimum initial engagement of 1 month. Most engagements work best over 3+ months, but no 3-month contract is required.
Capacity: Up to 20 hours per month initially: enough to be useful without becoming staff augmentation.
For: Engineering organisations without a senior architect, or needing principal-level leadership on cloud and AI decisions.
First step: Qualification form, then a fit call.

Ask about fractional support

The problem

Architectural decisions are inconsistent, slow or made without senior judgement.

Usually triggered by

The engineering team lacks senior architecture leadership
Growth
Multiple teams
Large platform decisions
A failed or slow architect hire
Follow-on from a review

Who it is for

Engineering organisations without a senior architect, or needing principal-level leadership on cloud and AI decisions.

Who it is not for

One-off needs that a review would answer better
Teams expecting full-time embedded work or a delivery owner
Anyone looking for a people manager, project manager or staff augmentation

What is covered

Architecture decisions
Design reviews
RFC reviews
AWS architecture
AI architecture
Technical roadmap
Reliability reviews
Scaling decisions
Cost decisions
Platform engineering direction
Security architecture guidance
Incident architecture reviews
Senior technical guidance
Engineering team consultation
Vendor/tool evaluation

What you get

Decision records, design review feedback, guidance, roadmap input

What success looks like. Faster, better-documented decisions and lower architectural risk, measured with the client per engagement.

How it works

Usually after a paid review
Agree cadence, scope and success measures

What we'll need from you

Access to leads and context
Decision backlog
Agreed cadence

Not included unless separately agreed

Full-time engineering management
People management
Daily standups
Ticket-by-ticket development
Primary on-call responsibility
24x7 support
Becoming the team's main developer
Unlimited Slack availability
Owning delivery for every engineering task
Acting as CTO
Project management
Staff augmentation

Recommendations are prioritised by business impact, reliability, security, cost, maintainability and implementation effort. InfraTales will not recommend additional complexity unless there is a clear reason for it. Example code or configuration may be included to explain a recommendation, but an engagement must not silently turn into an implementation project.

Rahul works with the engineering team as a senior architecture partner. He does not replace the engineering team.

After this

Longer advisory or scoped implementation.

Who leads the work

Focus: Principal Cloud & AI Platform Architect focused on production AWS systems, event-driven architecture, serverless, DevOps, platform engineering and production AI.
Experience: Rahul Ladumor has 9+ years of experience building production software, cloud, platform and AI systems.
Certifications: Rahul holds AWS Professional certifications in Solutions Architecture, DevOps Engineering and Generative AI Development.
Community: Rahul is a 5x AWS Community Builder in the Serverless category.
Consulting: Rahul has worked as an independent Cloud & AI consultant since March 2023.