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.

How to run an AI architecture review
How to run an AI architecture review
12 Aug, 2026 | 07 Mins read

An architecture review for an AI system catches design flaws at the cheapest possible stage: before implementation. A data pipeline that cannot handle the expected volume, a model serving architecture

Scaling a recommendation engine from 1K to 10M users
Scaling a recommendation engine from 1K to 10M users
11 Aug, 2026 | 06 Mins read

A video streaming platform grew from 1,000 beta users to 10 million subscribers over thirty months. Their recommendation system was rebuilt three times during this period. Each rebuild was triggered n

The art of saying no to AI projects
The art of saying no to AI projects
10 Aug, 2026 | 05 Mins read

Every AI team I have worked with has a graveyard of projects that should have been killed early but were not. A chatbot that no one uses. A recommendation engine that does not outperform a simple heur

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