I take one or two engagements at a time, alongside a full-time role. That constraint is the point: it keeps the work to problems where senior judgement is the bottleneck, not headcount.
Email Basant Taking one or two consulting engagements · I reply within two business days. If I can't take it, I'll say so in the first reply.
Four shapes an engagement takes
Architecture review
A read of the application, database, platform, and agent layers against failure modes I have actually hit, with written recommendations you can act on without me.
Platform and database work
Ingestion, processing, and serving on Kubernetes, plus HA, backup, upgrades, and the operating model so your team owns the stores when I leave.
Agentic systems
An agent that has to touch production data: which tools it may call, what validates the output, how you evaluate a change before rollout, and where the result is persisted. LangGraph, Google ADK, LangChain, MCP.
Fractional data lead
Design review, hiring input and mentoring for a team that needs senior judgement more than another pair of hands.
Availability
Taking one or two consulting engagements — 15–30 hrs/week, Scheduled overlap with European afternoons and US mornings.
I work a shifted day by design. I agree a fixed overlap window in UTC for each engagement so daylight-saving changes do not shift expectations. Real overlap with your team, not asynchronous-only.
Availability updated August 11, 2026. If this page says one thing and my reply says another, believe the reply — but I keep this line current.
How to start
One paragraph is enough. If you can, include these three things so my first reply can be useful:
- What breaks today, and how do you find out? A customer email, an alert that fires, or a number somebody eventually notices is wrong — the three imply very different fixes.
- What is already running, and what cannot be replaced? Engines, orchestrator, cloud, warehouse — plus the contractual or organizational constraints on each.
- What decision are you trying to make, and by when? “Should we move off the warehouse” and “our pipeline is down” both need help, but not the same engagement.
Repositories, diagrams and dashboards are welcome but never required in a first email. A paragraph of honest description beats a polished deck.
What I don’t do
Declining the wrong work early is cheaper for both of us than discovering the mismatch in week three.
- Dashboard-only work. If the problem is the pipeline, a nicer chart will not fix it.
- Engagements without a decision-maker on your side. I have watched good architecture die in committee.
- Rescue projects with a fixed date already announced to customers.
What I commit to
I reply within two business days. If I can’t take it, I’ll say so in the first reply. I will tell you when a problem does not need me, or needs someone cheaper, and I will say what I think you should do instead.
Work I do ships with the things that make it survivable without me: runbooks, named dataset owners, freshness objectives, and a cost model your finance team can read.