11/01/2026 updated

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60 % partially available

AI Architect & Fractional CTO / CAIO | LLM & Multi-Agent Systems | NLP & ML Expert

Amsterdam, Netherlands
Worldwide
PhD, Computational Linguistics, Universidad de Malaga (2019), Marie Curie Fellow, EXPERT ITN
Amsterdam, Netherlands
Worldwide
PhD, Computational Linguistics, Universidad de Malaga (2019), Marie Curie Fellow, EXPERT ITN

Profile attachments

Dr_Hernani_Costa_CV_AI_Architect_2026-10.pdf
Dr_Hernani_Costa_CV_2026-10-31.pdf

About me

AI architect and fractional CTO / CAIO. 17 years of professional AI work, PhD in Computational Linguistics (Marie Curie Fellow). I design and secure LLM and agent systems (isolated agent execution, MCP tool governance, RAG, evaluation) and lead them into production. Based in the Netherlands.

AI AgentsAzure Kubernetes ServiceHelmLangChainAmazon Web ServicesComputer VisionMicrosoft AzureInformation RetrievalPython (Programming Language)PostgreSQLSoftware ArchitecturePrometheusSolution ArchitectureLarge Language ModelsGrafanaMulti-Agent SystemsPrompt EngineeringDeep LearningGenerative AIFastAPIKubernetesMachine Learning OperationsTerraformAWS EKSDocker

AI architect and fractional CTO / CAIO with 26+ years in technology, 17 years of professional AI work (since 2009) and a PhD in Computational Linguistics (Marie Curie Fellow).


AI and agentic systems

LLM pipelines, multi-agent orchestration, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), MCP and function calling. Agent harness design: context, tools, permissions, isolation, verification, evaluation and guardrails.

Designed and operate a governed multi-agent software delivery platform with isolated execution cells, scoped machine identities, governed tool surfaces, independent merge checks and post-merge verification. More than 14,000 merged pull requests. Built the AI Radar publishing engine.


Production LLM platforms

LangGraph supervisor graphs and Postgres checkpointing, FastAPI, pgvector retrieval and Pydantic validation. Model-agnostic routing across OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Mistral and Cohere, with tenant-level configuration and token/cost tracking.


Cloud-native delivery

Kubernetes on Azure AKS and AWS EKS; Helm, KEDA, Kubernetes Jobs and Key Vault CSI. Terraform for AKS, container registry, API Management, PostgreSQL, Redis, Key Vault, private endpoints and DNS. AWS SageMaker, Lambda, Step Functions, DynamoDB, S3 and EC2; Azure AI; serverless, microservices, IoT data and MLOps.


Observability and release assurance

LangFuse and LangSmith tracing; Prometheus, Grafana and Loki. Nightly LLM evaluations, load and resilience tests, GitHub Actions CI/CD, Playwright end-to-end tests, Trivy scanning and OpenAPI contract checks.


Technical leadership

Fractional CTO / CAIO / CIO: vision, architecture decisions, team formation and investor alignment. Led five teams and more than 30 people across permanent staff and contractors, onshore and offshore. AI readiness assessments, responsible-AI frameworks and compliance-aware design.


NLP, ML and computer vision

Information extraction and retrieval, recommender systems, machine translation and terminology extraction. Computer vision and deep learning on drone, satellite and mobile imagery; production GAN systems.


Languages: English (fluent), Portuguese (native), Spanish (professional working proficiency). 34 publications, more than 30 peer-reviewed.

Experience

Professional experience10+ years
Freelancer since2017

Languages

EnglishFluentPortugueseNative speakerSpanishGood

Project history

Founder and Fractional CxO (CTO / CAIO)

First AI Movers
Designed and operate a governed multi-agent delivery platform with agents running in isolated execution cells under scoped machine identities, reaching tools through governed MCP and connector surfaces, shipping only through an independent merge-judge and post-merge verification. More than 14,000 merged pull requests delivered through the platform. Built the AI Radar publishing engine on the same foundation. Served as fractional CTO for a wellness-intelligence platform, delivered AI workflows for a dental clinic group, and conducted an AI readiness audit for a FinTech scale-up.

Founder and Director

Hernani Holding B.V.
Dutch private company through which InGenius ran; First AI Movers is its trading name from January 2025.

Co-Founder and Investor (not hands-on)

Tarucca
Renewable-energy startup using AWS microservices for wind-turbine IoT data, sensor-to-prediction pipelines, and ML for wind-farm efficiency.

AI / Tech Advisor (part-time)

CalendHer Technologies
AI strategy, machine-learning adoption, and product roadmap advisory for a scheduling SaaS company.

AI CTO and Co-Founder

InGenius
Built a serverless AWS backend (Step Functions, DynamoDB) for AI course-content generation. NLP and agentic tools cut course creation from weeks to minutes.

Chief Information Officer

Bondify.com
Delivered modular, secure AWS architecture and an AI-powered contract-generation MVP. Aligned technology roadmap with investors.

CTO and Co-Founder

Experdata
HealthTech SaaS turning large pharmaceutical datasets into expert-discovery intelligence for Pfizer. Built from scratch: AWS cloud, data pipelines, APIs, dashboards, AI/ML search and expert matching. Recruited and led the development team.

Director of AI and Engineering

Lalaland.ai
Generative-AI platform for fashion e-commerce. Led ML engineering and cloud infrastructure for a production computer-vision and GAN system. Managed 5 teams and 30+ people across permanent staff and contractors, onshore and offshore.

Tech Team Lead

Kaios.ai
Led a 10-person team through more than 10 computer-vision and deep-learning projects on drone, satellite, and mobile imagery.

NLP Data Scientist

Elsevier
Built a large-scale NLP recommender system for scientific content, end to end from requirements to cloud deployment.

Data Engineer

GeoPhy


ML Engineer and NLP Data Scientist

StartMonday

NLP recommendation engine matching candidates to jobs, from user-journey analysis to production.

Marie Curie Early Stage Researcher

Universidad de Malaga

Marie Curie Fellow in the EXPERT Initial Training Network. Multilingual NLP, cross-language information retrieval, comparable corpora, terminology extraction and machine translation. Secondments at the University of Wolverhampton and Translated.

Researcher

CISUC, University of Coimbra

Professional AI research in artificial selective attention and recommender systems for intelligent transportation. Award of Scientific Excellence, PAAMS 2013; Best Paper nomination, EPIA 2011. Co-supervised an MSc thesis, 2011–2012.

Part-time Teacher

ISEC Coimbra



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