Alejandro
Rioja.
Book intro →
AI Engineer · Austin, TX 2 slots open

Hire an AI engineer
who actually ships code.

Austin-based. Twelve years of growth + SEO experience now applied to building AI agent systems on top of Claude, GPT-5, Gemini, and the Anthropic Agent SDK. The site you're reading is one of them.

Based in Austin · Remote-friendly · 30-min discovery first
What you actually get

Working agents, not slide decks.

Every milestone is a working artifact in your stack. Repo access, runnable scripts, deployed agents. None of the "we'll send a deck Friday" nonsense.

Build

Custom AI agents for your stack

Code-first builds on top of Claude, GPT-5, Gemini, and the Anthropic Agent SDK. Cloudflare Workers + Pages, Vercel, or your existing infra. Repo access from day one.

Wire up

Tool calls to your actual tools

Stripe, Resend, Notion, Linear, Slack, Google Workspace, HubSpot, internal APIs. The agent reaches into the systems your team already lives in.

Harden

Evals, guardrails, observability

The boring 80% that turns a demo into something you trust with payroll-grade tasks. PromptFoo / Braintrust / Langfuse integration as appropriate.

Handoff

Your team owns it after week 8

Runbook, prompts, configs, on-call shape. I stay reachable for 30 days of bug-shaped questions. No vendor lock-in, no rental contract.

Alejandro Rioja
Who you're hiring

UCLA '17. Founder + AI agent builder.
Austin operator.

I built and ran 11 brands from Austin — and today I operate Pickleland alongside the AI agent work. Every brand I built used agent systems I designed internally; now I'm taking on a small number of external engagements.

Cited in Forbes, Inc., HuffPost, BBC, Mashable. Wrote the 247-issue SEO + growth newsletter that runs alongside the agent work.

The stack I work in

Modern. Boring. Battle-tested.

Models
  • Claude 4.5 / 4.6 / 4.7
  • GPT-5 + GPT-4o (routing)
  • Gemini 2.5 (Workspace integrations)
  • Open-source via Replicate / Together
Infra
  • Cloudflare Workers + Pages
  • Vercel + Next.js / Astro
  • Supabase / Neon / D1
  • Your AWS / GCP if needed
Glue
  • Anthropic Agent SDK + Claude Code
  • OpenAI Assistants / Responses API
  • LangChain / LlamaIndex (selectively)
  • Internal MCP servers

FAQ for hiring an AI engineer in Austin.

Are you based in Austin?

Yes — Austin, TX. I'll happily meet at Pickleland (the indoor pickleball facility I own in Pflugerville) or Radio Coffee in South Austin for the discovery call. Remote engagements are fine; in-person is fine too.

What does a typical engagement look like?

3–8 weeks. Week 1 mapping. Weeks 2–3 first runnable agent loop. Weeks 3–6 hardening (evals + observability). Week 7+ handoff. Pricing is custom by scope — discovery call sizes it. Two builds at a time is my hard cap.

Will you sign an NDA before the discovery call?

Yes. Send me yours, or I'll send mine. The mutual standard from Docracy works fine for most cases.

Do you work with agencies and dev shops?

Sometimes. If you're an agency placing me with a client, my rate is straight time-and-materials with a minimum 4-week engagement. Pass-through is fine; just be upfront with the client about who's actually building.

Why not just use a Big-4 consulting firm?

Because what they ship is a deck, what I ship is a deployed agent. If you want a 60-page deliverable, hire them. If you want a working system in your repo, hire me. (And if you want both: hire me, then have them write the deck about what I built.)

2 build slots · Austin or remote

Let's scope an AI agent build.

30-minute discovery call. I'll tell you whether an agent is the right answer or whether you should just hire one strong dev.