How we work together.
A short guide to how I work, what an engagement looks like, and the terms behind it. Worth a five-minute read before our intro call.
Teams that need a trusted second pair of eyes.
I work best with engineering and product leaders in European SMEs and scale-ups who have an AI initiative that needs an independent perspective. You may have a system that is misbehaving, an architecture decision you want validated, a vendor pitch you want stress-tested, or a compliance question you cannot afford to get wrong.
I am Bhavesh Jain, a data scientist and project manager based in Germany. Six years building real machine learning systems. I take on a small number of independent advisory engagements each year — advisory and reviews only.
Advisory, not implementation.
Every engagement is scoped individually. I focus on three things:
- Independent reviews — architecture reviews, system audits, vendor evaluation, second opinions. Written deliverables, async-friendly.
- EU AI Act readiness — compliance assessments, risk classification, gap analysis against current EU guidance, and a prioritized remediation roadmap.
- Advisory — ongoing advisory on production AI practices, evaluation methods, and AI governance, built around your context.
Pricing and scope are agreed in writing before any work starts. If your need does not fit, write to me and I will tell you honestly whether I am the right person.
What a recent review actually delivered.
Two weeks. German Mittelstand SaaS, ~80 engineers. Their retrieval-augmented support pipeline was returning correct-sounding but wrong answers in production; their internal team had been chasing the cause for two months.
What I actually did: reviewed their system, built an evaluation set on their real support tickets, ran a failure-mode taxonomy across 200 cases, and wrote a prioritized set of recommendations. Their team implemented the changes. Anonymised on request; full reference available on a call.
Being honest about scope.
A short list of things I will turn down or refer elsewhere, so we both save time:
From first email to handover.
Five steps. No agency layers, no proposal templates.
Intro call
Thirty minutes. We talk about what you are building, what is stuck, and what success looks like. No pitch, no follow-up unless you ask.
Written scope
Within 48 hours of the call, you receive a written scope: what I will deliver, what the format is, and a fixed price or hour estimate. No hidden hours.
Kick-off
We set up a shared workspace (Notion, Linear, or whatever you use) and a Slack channel. I send a short written update every week.
Review and deliver
I review your system or material, run any agreed analyses, and produce the written deliverable. You see drafts at each milestone, no surprises at the end.
Handover
Final written deliverable, a walkthrough session for your team, and two weeks of follow-up questions. After that, your team owns the next steps.
Terms and logistics.
A small story instead of a list.
On a recent review, week two, the evaluation I built flagged that retrieval was randomly picking one of three vector indexes instead of the one their team had configured. A code path nobody had touched in months. I caught it because the evaluation set was the first thing I built — before reading any retrieval code — and the metric dropped 12 points overnight when I switched indexes.
If the team had been relying on impressions, that bug would have stayed in production. They would have spent another month chasing "why does it sometimes work". Instead they had a written note in the handover doc explaining what I caught and how to fix it.
That is roughly how I work. Evaluation before opinions. Written updates so you see decisions as they happen. And if my first read does not survive contact with your data, you hear it from me before the engagement ends.
Five things people ask before booking.
What if scope changes mid-engagement?
Scope is agreed in writing before kick-off and does not move silently. Small course corrections are baked into the buffer. Anything larger gets a written change-order with a fixed delta price. No surprise invoices.
Can you start sooner than 2 to 4 weeks?
Sometimes. If your problem is urgent and the engagement is small, I can squeeze it into a current week. Longer engagements are scheduled around active commitments. Ask, and I will tell you honestly.
Do you sign NDAs and client MSAs?
Yes. A standard mutual NDA goes out before any work starts. For your master services agreement, I usually start from your template and flag anything that does not make sense for a one-person operation.
What if I need implementation, not just advice?
I focus on advisory and reviews — I do not take end-to-end implementation work. If you need a build partner, I am happy to recommend specialists I trust who can pick up where my review leaves off.
What if the review says "do not build this"?
Sometimes that is the right answer, and you still get the full written deliverable: the rationale, the evidence, and a recommendation on what to do instead. I would rather save you a misspent quarter than rubber-stamp a direction that should not ship.
Ready to talk?
The fastest way to know if we are a fit is a thirty-minute intro call.