Forward-Deployed Engineer · AI Transformation for Fintech, Payments & BNPL. I help regulated businesses turn AI into shipped operating capability — not pilots. As a forward-deployed engineer I embed inside the customer's environment and own the full deployment arc — discovery, integration, production build, and operations — meeting stakeholders from line analysts to CTOs, wiring into real APIs, data pipelines, and enterprise constraints (SSO/SAML/OAuth, legacy systems, compliance), and staying on the problem with radical ownership until the system is reliable, measurable, and safe to run.
I'm a Forward-Deployed Engineer at Technova Solutions (Codenovai) and Lead, AI Transformation at Cashew Payments and Hazelpay — Dubai-based fintechs building BNPL, merchant financing, and healthcare financing in the UAE. There, AI has to support regulated workflows, customer journeys, credit approvals, orchestration, and automation with clear business outcomes — every agent shipped behind evals, observability, and a human boundary.
Agents do the heavy lifting. Evals keep them honest. Senior engineering holds the boundary.
- 🚀 Forward-Deployed Delivery — customer-embedded engineering: prototypes, production MVPs, and enterprise AI systems built in the field, not in isolation
- 🤖 Fintech & Payments AI — AI workflow design for BNPL, merchant financing, healthcare financing, credit decisioning, KYC, and digital finance operations
- 🔌 Integration & Solution Engineering — REST/GraphQL API integration, data pipelines, third-party & core-banking connectors, and SaaS customization inside messy enterprise stacks
- ⚙️ Agentic Automation — multi-agent orchestration, role design, tool/MCP servers, AI copilots, workflow automation, and internal operating systems
- ♻️ AIDLC — the eight-phase AI Development Lifecycle used to move from framed problem to operated, eval-guarded production systems
- 🧪 Production AI Systems — RAG, evaluation frameworks, observability, operating metrics, and cost-aware deployment
- 🔐 Sovereign & Regulated AI — privacy-aware, compliance-minded deployment patterns for sensitive business environments; on-prem & local LLM runtime via Ollama, LM Studio, and llama.cpp for data-sovereign fintech and healthcare workflows
- 👥 AI Engineering Leadership — building, structuring, and operating teams that ship reliable AI transformation programs
Forward-Deployed Engineer (FDE), Forward Deployed Software Engineer, Customer-Facing Engineer, Solutions / Deployment Engineer, Field / Embedded Engineer, AI Transformation Lead, AI Transformation Leader, Fintech AI Engineer, Payments AI, BNPL AI, Merchant Financing AI, Healthcare Financing AI, Credit Decisioning & KYC AI, Digital Finance Automation, Enterprise AI Integration, API / Data Pipeline Integration, RAG & Agent Orchestration, LLM Evaluation Engineer, Prompt Engineering, Agentic Software Engineer, Enterprise AI MVP Builder, UAE Fintech AI, Dubai AI Engineer, AI Automation for Payments, AI Product Engineer, MCP & Agentic Systems, Sovereign / Private AI, PDPL · DIFC · SOC 2 Compliant AI, Local LLM / Ollama, On-Prem AI Deployment, AI Engineering Leadership, Cashew Payments, Hazelpay, Technova / Codenovai
AIDLC — the AI Development Lifecycle: eight phases from a framed problem to an operated, eval-guarded system. It's how I move organizations beyond pilots into production AI that can be measured, watched, and trusted.
🧭 Frame → 📐 Spec → 🏗️ Scaffold → 🤖 Generate → 🧪 Eval → 🛡️ Harden → 🚀 Ship → 📡 Operate
| # | Phase | What happens | Enterprise value |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 🧭 Frame | Turn a fuzzy business problem into a sharp, testable problem statement | Build the right thing — no expensive guesses |
| 2 | 📐 Spec | Define behavior, boundaries, data contracts, and success criteria | Shared truth across stakeholders & agents |
| 3 | 🏗️ Scaffold | Stand up the repo, agents, tools/MCP, and an Infra-as-Code skeleton (Terraform · SST) | A walking skeleton in days |
| 4 | 🤖 Generate | Agents do the heavy lifting under senior engineering review | Velocity without losing the plot |
| 5 | 🧪 Eval | Evaluation suites grade behavior, quality, and regressions | Quality you can prove, not hope for |
| 6 | 🛡️ Harden | DevSecOps — security, cost, privacy, and failure-mode hardening | Sovereign-ready (PDPL · DIFC), cost-aware |
| 7 | 🚀 Ship | Release behind evals + observability — nothing ships blind | Confident, reversible launches |
| 8 | 📡 Operate | AIOps — decision-level observability, live cost control, and agentic rollback | Production AI you can actually manage |
| Company / Project | My role | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| 💳 Cashew Payments | Lead, AI Transformation | UAE BNPL / all-in-one digital financing platform — flexible installments on larger purchases across healthcare, education, automotive, wellness & home improvement, approved in minutes. I lead AI across credit journeys, approvals, orchestration & automation. |
| 🏥 Hazelpay | AI Transformation | UAE healthcare financing platform (a Cashew Technology product, powered by Mashreq): patients pay monthly, clinics get paid today — dental, LASIK, fertility, cosmetic, MedSpa & hair. AI-driven origination and clinic-side workflow orchestration in a regulated environment. |
| ⚙️ Technova Solutions / Codenovai | Forward-Deployed Engineer | Dubai agent-native software studio — not a consultancy, a studio that ships. Agentic AI (Claude Agent Skills, MCP, AWS Strands) with evals, review gates & audit logs; private/sovereign AI + RAG for regulated GCC businesses. |
| 🧾 Hisabi.ai | Builder & Maintainer | AI Accountant — invoicing, books, VAT & payroll for any country. Speak, snap, type, or paste to generate invoices in seconds. ~150 countries, any ISO-4217 currency, bilingual EN/AR for the GCC. |
| 🌐 pooyagolchian.com | Author | Writing & playbooks on forward-deployed AI, agentic engineering, AIDLC, and building production AI systems that survive the real world. |
RevOps AI turns Notion into the database for an AI sales team — Gemini runs as an autonomous agent over a Kanban pipeline synced to Notion, scores leads 0–100, drafts emails, and answers revenue questions in natural language. The agentic core auto-maps all 22 Notion MCP tools to Gemini function declarations, so the model decides which operations to run — no hardcoded glue.
🏅 Built for the Notion MCP Challenge (Notion × MLH) — earned the challenge completion badge.
🤖 Models
🛠️ Agentic Dev Tools & CLIs
🔌 Protocols & Retrieval
⚙️ Build
☁️ Ship
🔭 AIOps · DevSecOps · IaC
Libraries I publish and maintain on npm — currency primitives, Vue/Nuxt UI & theming, CSS tooling, and local-LLM hooks. Versions and download counts below are live and auto-refreshed weekly.
pooya🤖 AI / Agentic
| Package | What it does | Version | Downloads |
|---|---|---|---|
use-local-llm |
React hooks for streaming responses from local LLMs — Ollama, LM Studio, llama.cpp. Zero server required. |  |
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💱 Currency & i18n
| Package | What it does | Version | Downloads |
|---|---|---|---|
dirham |
UAE Dirham currency symbol (U+20C3). Web font, CSS, React, and Web Component for Vue, Angular, Svelte &… |  |
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riyal |
The Saudi Riyal currency symbol (U+20C1) as a web font, CSS utility, React, Vue 3, Svelte 5, React Native, and… |  |
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🎨 Vue / Nuxt — UI & Theming
| Package | What it does | Version | Downloads |
|---|---|---|---|
vue-multiple-themes |
Vue 3 multi-theme engine: CSS custom properties, TailwindCSS opacity modifiers, white-label brand contexts,… |  |
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nuxt-multiple-themes |
Nuxt 3 module for vue-multiple-themes — multi-theme engine with CSS custom properties, TailwindCSS, WCAG… |  |
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vue-js-star-rating |
Zero-dependency Vue 3.5+ star rating component — WCAG 2.2 accessible, TypeScript-first, half-star precision,… |  |
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🧰 CSS Tooling
| Package | What it does | Version | Downloads |
|---|---|---|---|
scss-helper |
A remarkable SCSS/CSS utility toolkit — fills the gaps in Tailwind CSS v3/v4 and pure-SCSS projects with… |  |
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Notes on the agentic era — AIDLC, evals, and how engineering roles are changing.
- Bolts vs Sprints: How Agentic Teams Measure Work Now
- How to Build an App With a Ralph Loop and a Goal Prompt
- How to Write a Spec an AI Agent Can Actually Build
- Managing and Training a Technical Team to Ship With Agents
- The Spec-to-Bolt Loop: The Agentic Development Cycle End to End
📚 Read more on pooyagolchian.com →
Open to forward-deployed / solutions engineering, fintech AI transformation, BNPL / payments AI, healthcare financing automation, enterprise AI integration, agentic systems, and fractional AI engineering leadership.
⚡ Built agentically — this profile is maintained with Claude Code skills & agents in .claude/
🧩 Reusable skills, installable anywhere — npx skills add pooyagolchian/pooyagolchian/<skill> · sync-npm-packages · forge-badge · profile-doctor