AI Architecture Review · Consulting Engagement

AI Architecture Review

Find out whether your AI system is actually production-ready — reviewed against the same ten pillars I hold every system to, before you commit further budget or go live.

Engagement: Fixed-scope architecture review
Delivery: Remote, worldwide

The problem

AI prototypes get built fast, often without anyone stepping back to ask whether the architecture will hold under real production load, real security pressure, or real governance scrutiny. By the time gaps in scalability, security or cost surface, they're expensive to fix. An architecture review finds them while they're still cheap to fix.

Who this is for

Founders and CTOs about to take an AI system from pilot to production

Engineering leaders inheriting an AI system built by a previous team or vendor

Companies running technical due diligence before an investment or acquisition involving an AI product

Teams that suspect architecture or security debt but have no independent way to confirm it

Approach — the ten pillars

The same methodology behind every review and case study on this site — see it in full on the Production AI section of the homepage.

01

Scalability

Horizontal scale, stateless services, sharding, load-aware autoscaling.

02

Security

Zero-trust, RBAC/ABAC, secrets management, least privilege, defense in depth.

03

AI Security / Guardrails

Prompt-injection & jailbreak defense, tool sandboxing, human-in-the-loop.

04

Reliability & Resilience

Fallbacks, retries, circuit breakers, graceful degradation, DR.

05

Observability

Traces, metrics, logs, evals and cost in one pane.

06

Governance

EU AI Act / ISO 42001 / NIST AI RMF, audit trails, model & data lineage.

07

Cost Optimization

Routing by cost, caching, right-sized models, budget guardrails.

08

Data & RAG Security

Permission-aware retrieval, poisoning detection, citation verification.

09

Performance

Latency budgets, streaming, batching, semantic caching, profiling.

10

Maintainability / DevSecOps

IaC, CI/CD, SBOM & supply-chain scanning, typed contracts, tests.

Technical scope

Architecture Diagrams & Data FlowModel / Inference LayerRAG / Retrieval PipelineAgent Orchestration & Tool PermissionsCloud Infrastructure & DeploymentObservability & Evaluation SetupCost & Scaling ModelGovernance & Compliance Posture

Deliverables

A structured findings report scored against all ten pillars

Concrete, prioritized recommendations — not a generic checklist

A clear go / no-go read on production readiness

A walkthrough call to discuss findings with your team

FAQ

What do you actually review?

Architecture diagrams and data flow, the model/inference layer, RAG or retrieval pipeline, agent orchestration and tool permissions, cloud infrastructure, observability setup, cost model and governance posture — scored against ten pillars.

Do I need to give you production access?

No. Most reviews work from architecture documentation, diagrams and a working session with your team. Production access is only used if agreed and scoped in advance.

What if you find nothing wrong?

Then you have independent confirmation your architecture holds up — valuable in itself, especially ahead of an investment, audit or governance review.

Is this the same as a security assessment?

Security is one of the ten pillars reviewed here. For a dedicated, adversarial security test of LLMs, agents and MCP, see the AI Security Assessment instead.

Have an AI system you're about to take to production?

A structured, ten-pillar review before you commit further budget or go live.