Work Services About Contact

Amsterdam

Carlos
Serna

AI Product Architect

AI-native engineering with 25 years of distributed-systems discipline. The hard part of AI isn't the demo. It's making it reliable in production, and handing it to a team that can keep it running. That's the work I do: the architecture, the working code, and the knowledge transfer to own it after I leave. Project-based.

Start a conversation See services

Services

Three ways in, depending on where you are.

01

"Where does AI actually fit, and is what I have any good?"

A roadmap, a code review, or a prompt audit. A straight answer on where AI earns its place, or whether what you've built will hold up in production.

From €5KSee what's involved → 02

"I know what I need. I want it built and handed over."

End-to-end build, made with your engineers in the room — so the working system and the knowledge to run it both stay once I leave.

From €20KSee what's involved → 03

"I want a senior AI perspective on call."

Someone who has shipped production AI to pressure-test your decisions, weigh vendors, and answer what your team can't yet. Retainer or by the hour.

€200/hr · from €3K/moSee what's involved →

Selected work

01 Executive Network Intelligence A Group CFO with nearly two thousand professional relationships and no way to track who mattered or when to reconnect. I built a system that scores every contact, drafts the outreach, and runs inside the Excel he already worked in. In production. Enterprise View → 02 Document Intelligence Platform Years of internal documents nobody can search properly — contracts, reports, knowledge locked in PDFs. A configurable platform that turns any document corpus into a knowledge layer you can question in plain language, with every answer traced back to its source. Platform View → 03 NIN Social Brain Lab Technical lead for a neuroscience research institute. Two builds in one engagement: fMRI experiment software precise enough for published research, and a public website the lab maintains itself. Ongoing. Research View → 04 Multi-Agent AI Platform A consumer AI product that had to run dozens of AI tasks reliably, bill each user by actual usage, and keep personal data off the server entirely. A multi-agent platform doing all three in production. Platform View → 05 AI Content Pipeline Turning a full manuscript into narrated video by hand takes months. An automated pipeline that does it end to end, holding character and voice consistent across hours of finished output. Creative View → 06 Anvil — Assistant Framework The assistant framework underneath the rest of my work. Persistent memory, background curation, specialist agents. I run my own practice on it, and clone it to stand up a dedicated assistant for each client. Framework View →
15

AI systems in production, beyond the six above.

Across medical research, executive productivity, creative tooling, travel, and game design. Most run on the framework above. Different domains, the same engineering underneath.

About

Carlos Serna

25 years building systems.
The last two, with AI in the core.

I'm a software architect based in Amsterdam. My career runs through Booking.com, ING, Credit Suisse, and Ingenico — distributed systems at production scale, with all the failure modes that implies.

Two years ago I started wiring AI into the core of systems rather than bolting it on. The last year has been production LLM pipelines and multi-agent architectures. The work that interests me is where engineering discipline meets the probabilistic nature of AI models.

I work project-based. Not embedded, not available for daily standups.

Based Amsterdam, Netherlands

Languages English · Spanish · Dutch

Background Fintech · e-commerce · distributed systems · research infrastructure

FAQ

What does Carlos Serna do? +

Carlos designs and builds production AI systems — the architecture, the working code, the knowledge transfer. Project-based engagements. He doesn't take embedded roles or open-ended retainers.

Who is this for? +

Founders, technical leaders, principal investigators — anyone with a real AI problem and budget to solve it. Some are starting fresh. Others have a prototype that never made it to production, or a system that works in demos and breaks under load. The criteria are the same: a real problem, a team that will own the result, and no interest in another deck.

What does it cost? +

An AI Roadmap (five-day discovery sprint) runs €5,000–€8,000. A First Build Together (end-to-end implementation of your first production AI system) runs €20,000–€30,000 over 3–5 weeks. Advisory retainer is €3,000–€4,500 per month, or €200 per hour on-demand.

What kind of AI systems does Carlos build? +

LLM pipelines, multi-agent systems, RAG architectures, document intelligence platforms, and network intelligence tools. Twenty-five years of distributed systems. The last two building AI into production — the last year in multi-agent and LLM-native architectures.

Where is Carlos based? +

Amsterdam, Netherlands. He works with clients remotely and in-person across Europe.

Contact

Let's find out
if there's a fit.

Describe your problem and roughly where you are. I'll come back within 48 hours.

carlos@carlosserna.com