Fractional AI Advisory & Build Practice

Ship LLM products that actually work in production.

I help mid-market companies cut through the AI hype and build real systems — not demo-ware that breaks the first time a customer touches it. Fractional advisory, scoped builds, and coding-agent enablement for engineering teams.

Principal Engineer, Yahoo Finance AWS patent holder 25+ years shipping software Bedrock · RAG · Terraform
What I do

Four ways I help teams get real value from AI.

Every engagement is scoped to what you actually need — from a one-time roadmap review to an embedded build cycle.

01

AI strategy & advisory

Roadmap reviews, vendor evaluation, and build-vs-buy decisions — senior technical judgment for leaders making consequential AI bets.

02

AI product builds

Scoped proofs-of-concept and production LLM pipelines. Bedrock and RAG architecture built for reliability, cost, and retrieval quality.

03

Coding-agent enablement

Workshops, programs, and embedded coaching to get your engineers genuinely productive with Claude Code, Cursor, and similar tools — integrated into your real workflow and codebase, not generic training.

04

Fractional engagements

Ongoing advisory or build relationships when you need a senior LLM practitioner in the loop — without the cost and commitment of a full-time hire.

Background

A builder, not a slide-deck consultant.

As Principal Software Engineer at Yahoo Finance, I lead a generative-AI team applying large language models to financial data at scale — real-time summaries, insights, and analysis used by millions of people.

Before that, I spent years at Amazon and AWS: cloud-native backends for the Astro consumer robot, machine learning for AWS security, and teaching at Amazon's Machine Learning University. I hold a US patent for analyzing network reachability without sending packets.

I also designed, built, and shipped Luminaire single-handedly — an AI product-expert and business-intelligence app live in the Ecwid marketplace. It's RAG over a store's catalog plus plain-language BI: the kind of system that only holds up in production when you bring real cost control, hallucination boundaries, retrieval quality, and the unglamorous infrastructure that separates a demo from something you'd let touch a customer.

The short version

25+
Years in softwareSenior & principal-level throughout
LLM
Production, at scaleBedrock, RAG, serverless pipelines serving millions
1
AWS patentPacketless network reachability analysis
MS
Georgia TechComputational Perception & Robotics · BS Mathematics
Is it a fit?

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Get in touch

Let's talk about what you're building.

Tell me a bit about your project and I'll get back to you. Engagements are scoped individually — no obligation in reaching out.

Or email directly: hello@billkocik.com

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