Build • Solve • Scale
AI and data systems that hold up in production.
For startups and growing companies that need AI features, data pipelines, or cloud backends built properly, without hiring a full team first. Senior engineering from a Toronto-based independent practice.
Sound familiar?
Build
Your AI prototype shines in the demo, then gives confident wrong answers in front of customers.
AI & RAG applications
Retrieval, agents, and evaluation suites that measure answer quality, so you ship on evidence instead of hope. Amazon Bedrock, the Claude API, and open models.
Solve
Your data lives in a dozen places, and the pipelines that join it are slow, fragile, or both.
Data pipelines
Batch and streaming pipelines on Spark, Databricks, and Kafka, built to be tested, monitored, and fast enough that nobody waits on them.
Scale
Your cloud bill grew faster than your users, and every deploy is a manual ritual.
Backend & cloud
Backends and infrastructure as code on AWS, Azure, or GCP, with automated CI/CD and a bill that matches real load.
Results
Thousands of self-serve requests a day
Before: Analysts waited on engineers for every question about their data.
What I did: Built an agentic natural-language query platform over hundreds of datasets, with regression tests that checked its answers.
Three days to ship, a few hours to run
Before: Each new data pipeline took about three weeks to ship and up to two days to run.
What I did: Designed a reusable ETL platform and a shared PySpark transformation framework.
Cloud costs cut by 50%
Before: Aging private-cloud infrastructure was expensive and hard to change.
What I did: Containerized the services and migrated everything to AWS with automated CI/CD.
Delivered in previous roles as an engineer and tech lead; employer and client names withheld.
Ways to work together
Assessment
A short, fixed-scope review of your AI system, data pipelines, or cloud setup. You get a written, prioritized plan you can act on, whether or not I do the work.
Build
I design and build it end to end, or alongside your engineers, with working demos along the way and a clean handover at the end.
Ongoing advice
A few hours a month of architecture reviews, technical hiring help, and a second opinion before the expensive decisions.
How it starts
Send a short email
A few sentences is plenty: what you're building, where you're stuck, and your timeline.
Intro call
Thirty minutes to see whether I'm the right fit. If I'm not, I'll say so and point you elsewhere.
Proposal
A clear scope, timeline, and cost before any work starts. No surprises.
About
Rayman JamalFounder & Lead Engineer
I’m a software engineer who specializes in data, AI, and cloud systems that have to work in production, not just in a demo. I’ve built them for global enterprises and growing SaaS companies alike. Ember Boulder is a one-engineer practice: you work directly with the person designing and writing your software, with no hand-offs and no account managers in between.
I also write about what I build at rrjamal.ca.
- AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate
- Databricks Certified Data Engineer Associate
Let’s build something great.
Tell me what you’re building and where you’re stuck. I read and answer every email myself.
rayman@emberboulder.dev