Team
Six disciplines, because five of them fail alone.
An engagement team is not a pile of engineers. Each of these roles owns a failure mode the others cannot see.
AI Engineer
Takes a model and turns it into a service: serving, inference performance, tool integration, and the software engineering around it. The emphasis is systems that run, rather than insight drawn from data.
Data Scientist
Collects and analyses data, applies statistics and machine learning to understand and predict, validates models, and communicates findings. Here, also owns evaluation design, the statistics of "is this actually better".
Agent Engineer
Prototypes agent architectures, tests them against the constraint the client actually has, and moves what survives into a framework someone else can operate.
MLOps / Platform Engineer
Deployment, CI/CD, registries, monitoring, retraining automation, rollback and incident response. Keeps systems accurate, available and governable after launch.
Data Engineer
Pipelines, contracts, quality and lineage, the substrate everything above depends on.
AI Governance Specialist
Risk classification, human-oversight design, documentation and evaluation evidence, mapped to the frameworks a client’s regulator cares about.
How we staff an engagement
QAI Labs runs as a small core group with a wider network of specialists. That shape is deliberate. It keeps the people who scoped the work on the work, and it means we can say no to things we are not the right team for.
A named engineer owns the work
One person is accountable for delivery from the first conversation to handover. You are not passed to a different team once the contract is signed, and you always know who to call.
The rest of the team is sized to the job
We bring in the disciplines a piece of work genuinely needs rather than staffing to a template. A six-week discovery does not need a platform engineer on it from day one.
We work inside your team, not beside it
Your repositories, your review process, your standups. If your own engineers are not touching the code during the build, the handover at the end will not hold.
Specialists come in for the parts that need them
Accreditation, sector regulation, unusual hardware. We would rather bring in someone who has done it before than learn it on your budget.
We do not publish headcount, and we would treat any consultancy that leads with it carefully. What matters on your engagement is who is actually assigned to it. Ask us that in the first call and we will tell you straight, including where we would bring somebody else in.
Want to know who would be on your project?
Tell us roughly what you are trying to build and we will tell you which of these disciplines it needs, who would lead it, and where we would want somebody from your side sitting alongside us.