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End of page. Start of the working loop.

If this site did its job, the next step is simple: download the public CV, read the field notes, or check the public proof. I am looking for AI product work where the model is only one part of the system.

Download public CVRead the notes
available for
Staff / Principal AI engineering roles
best work
harnesses, retrieval, evals, workflow control
base
Madrid / remote-first
paths
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context before autonomyevals before confidenceproof beats claimscode must stay legiblesystems over demospublic CV availablecontext before autonomyevals before confidenceproof beats claimscode must stay legiblesystems over demospublic CV available
(c) 2026 Petru Arakisspublic surface for product engineering work
about

I build the operating layer around AI.

I am Petru Arakiss, a Madrid-based engineering lead with 20 years in production software. My range is product, backend, frontend, data, and the runtime infrastructure that lets models do useful work inside real systems.

The useful signal is not that I use AI tools. It is that I can turn them into production systems with context, retrieval quality, guardrails, traces, reviews, and boundaries.

current proof
BIFROST, ORVIAN, Polaris
before that
BBVA, Santander/PagoFX, Bankinter, El Corte Ingles
best fit
Staff / Principal AI product engineering
projects →writing →download public cv →

background

I currently hold a dual role: AI Engineering Lead across BIFROST, ORVIAN, and Polaris, and Head of Frontend Platform for an enterprise product surface. These systems are the current proof, not the boundary: document intelligence, workflow runtimes, and internal AI assistants are all versions of the same problem of making AI useful inside real operations.

My range is broader than the current product surface. I build AI products, retrieval systems, agent runtimes, full-stack platforms, and the harnesses that let Codex, Claude, and human engineers collaborate without turning the codebase into noise.

My bias is toward retrieval quality, context assembly, eval loops, traces, and reliability. Most AI systems do not fail because the model is weak. They fail because the context is messy, the orchestration is vague, the tools are poorly bounded, and nobody defined what good looks like.

I learned to code at nine with a Pascal book and a dictionary missing half its pages. At twelve I copied a hacker website from Geocities so badly I left their HTML comments in the source for six months. When TensorFlow landed, I got pulled into AI. My first chatbot was a disaster: ask about the weather and it tried to sell you insurance.

Before AI I spent years doing full-stack work for banks and retailers. BBVA, Bankinter, PagoFX, El Corte Inglés, Decathlon. Deadlines were real. Compliance was real. Production bugs were expensive.

My day-to-day stack is Python, FastAPI, Next.js, TypeScript, PostgreSQL with pgvector, Supabase, and Redis. OpenAI and Anthropic APIs when they solve the problem. Not as a reflex.

This site is the personal track: employment conversations, writing, open source, and engineering judgment.

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 and built a modular React application from scratch. The useful part was not React itself. It was understanding what the old system got right, what it got wrong, and carrying that forward.

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
LinkedIn·X·GitHub