Simor

Data Infrastructure for Production AI

Practical writing on AI data engineering, feature stores, and the infrastructure choices that determine whether AI systems work in production.

Data contract template and negotiation guide
Data contract template and negotiation guide
09 Aug, 2026 | 07 Mins read

Data pipelines break because data producers and data consumers have different assumptions. The producer assumes the consumer can handle null values in a column. The consumer assumes the column is neve

The talent war: what AI engineers actually want in 2026
The talent war: what AI engineers actually want in 2026
08 Aug, 2026 | 03 Mins read

The market for AI engineers is the tightest it has been since the deep learning boom of 2017. Demand has grown 280% year-over-year for the "AI engineer" title, and the supply of experienced practition

Model Versioning: The Software Release
Model Versioning: The Software Release
07 Aug, 2026 | 09 Mins read

Your iPhone prompts you: iOS 18.4 is available. It includes improvements to battery performance, new photo editing tools, and a fix for crashes in third-party apps. You can install it now or wait. If

RAG at Scale: Architecture Patterns for Enterprise-Grade Retrieval
RAG at Scale: Architecture Patterns for Enterprise-Grade Retrieval
07 Aug, 2026 | 17 Mins read

Basic retrieval-augmented generation works well in demos and poorly in production. The demo shows a clean pipeline: chunk text, embed chunks, retrieve relevant chunks, feed them to the model. The prod

Privacy-preserving computation: differential privacy tools compared
Privacy-preserving computation: differential privacy tools compared
06 Aug, 2026 | 06 Mins read

Publishing aggregate statistics about a dataset sounds safe. The average salary in a department. The number of users in a geographic region. The distribution of query types in a search engine. But agg

Why every tech company is now a data company
Why every tech company is now a data company
05 Aug, 2026 | 03 Mins read

Five years ago, "data company" described a specific type of organization: a business whose primary product was data or data services — Snowflake, Databricks, Palantir, Bloomberg. Today, the distinctio

When the model was right but nobody believed it
When the model was right but nobody believed it
04 Aug, 2026 | 05 Mins read

An agriculture technology company built a crop yield prediction model that combined satellite imagery, soil sensor data, weather forecasts, and historical yield records. The model predicted per-field

Should every company build their own LLM? A contrarian view
Should every company build their own LLM? A contrarian view
03 Aug, 2026 | 05 Mins read

A pharmaceutical company I consulted for was three months into a project to fine-tune a large language model on their internal research corpus. The project had a team of four engineers, a budget of $8

Setting up a model registry: the minimal viable approach
Setting up a model registry: the minimal viable approach
02 Aug, 2026 | 06 Mins read

A model registry is the version control system for your trained models. Without one, teams track model versions by filename, store artifacts in ad-hoc cloud storage locations, and discover which model