We build the AI
in 3-6 months.
You keep the infrastructure.
Westover Labs brings a decade of US big tech engineering to European companies of every size — funded startups, established enterprises, and small businesses alike. Principal-tier expertise, right-sized to the engagement. Custom AI infrastructure that keeps running after we leave — better ROI than a five-year hire.
You need AI infrastructure.
You don't need a five-year hire to build it.
Most companies hire a staff engineer to build AI once, then keep them on indefinitely. There is a faster, cheaper, and more reliable model.
The Problem
Senior AI engineers command a steep full-time total-compensation package. Companies hire them to solve a specific architectural problem, then keep them on to justify the headcount. The system never ships. The dependency never ends.
Our Approach
A focused 3–6 month engagement. We assess your stack, design the AI infrastructure you actually need, build it in production, document every decision, and train your team to own it.
What You Keep
Systems that keep running. Runbooks your team can follow. AI agents handling work that used to require constant human hours. Infrastructure that maintains itself. ROI that shows up in year one.
Three ways we work with you.
Each engagement is scoped to outcomes, not hours. You know what you are getting and when.
AI Transformation Sprint
Full AI infrastructure buildout tailored to your domain — for companies that know they need AI but aren't sure where to start, or have started and got stuck.
Fractional CTO
Strategic technical leadership without full-time overhead — architecture, hiring guidance, and AI strategy for funded startups and scaling teams.
Rescue Mission
Turnaround for stalled or at-risk AI/infrastructure projects — root-cause fixes from a senior engineer, not another meeting.
Also Available
Quick Fix / Audit — for small businesses
Not every problem needs a multi-month engagement. A short, scoped-in-advance audit, bug fix, or piece of technical advisory, delivered fast — built for small businesses that need one specific thing done right, not a full transformation. See the full menu ↓
Not sure which engagement fits? Full pricing, deliverables, and the complete offer ladder — including the Trial Month option — live at westover.expert, the sole source of truth for engagement pricing.
Vibe-coded fast? We write the tests it skipped, then fix it properly.
Not every codebase needs a 3–6 month rebuild. If you — or an AI coding tool — shipped fast and something is now fragile, expensive, or you just want a senior second opinion before you scale, we do small, fixed-scope, fixed-price engagements. Every fix ships with characterization tests written first, so the change is provably behavior-preserving — the same tests pass before and after, not a rewrite you have to trust blindly.
Focused Review
A senior review of one thing — a codebase, an auth surface, a cloud setup, an architecture decision — with a prioritized findings register and concrete recommendations. No code changes.
Audit + Remediation
The Focused Review plus the fixes delivered as pull requests, with characterization tests written first, scoped to 2–3 named areas.
Cost Teardown + Fix
A teardown of what you're paying now — agency retainer, hosting, SaaS, cloud — with a real before/after number, then the migration onto free tiers, owned iron, or on-device.
Advisory Half-Day
A structured working session on a specific decision — should you self-host auth, is this ready to scale, where's the risk in this stack — with a written summary and recommendation.
Fixed means fixed — scope is frozen up front, and genuine unknowns become a short written change order, never silent creep. Full pricing, the Focused-Review-credits-toward-Audit-and-Remediation policy, and deliverables for each of these live at westover.expert.
Results across scale, not just credentials.
James Westover, founder of Westover Labs, has built production systems at Uber, HERE Technologies, and Postmates. Here is what that means in practice.
Navigation Platform at 1,400+ Nodes Per Data Center
Autonomous Driving Capture Fleet from 2 to 14 Engineers
Python 2 to 3 Migration Across a Full Monorepo
An AI Agent Team That Ships Code Around the Clock
Shipped products, not slide decks.
Every system described here is live in the App Store or running in production. These are the artifacts that prove what a two-and-a-half year solo engineering run looks like at Principal scope -- iOS, backend, infrastructure, and the agent platform powering all of it.
SkinVault
Private photo vault for sensitive skin documentation. On-device NSFW inference via ONNX Runtime -- no image ever leaves the device for classification. Privacy is the product, not a checkbox. Paying subscribers on the App Store.
Ghost Hunter
Paranormal detection app with a genuine cult following. v67+ runs all sensor inference on-device; models are served from Cloudflare R2 and updated without App Store releases. Shipped the decommission of a dedicated inference backend and moved entirely to on-device compute.
The Agent Platform
A 12-persona AI engineering organization running on self-hosted infrastructure -- planning, coding, reviewing, and deploying around the clock. Full Infrastructure as Code: Ansible, Cloudflare Tunnels, systemd, GitHub Actions CI/CD. Zero manual server operations. This is the system we build for clients.
The combination no other firm offers.
German national. Physics background. Ten years in US big tech. Now building AI infrastructure for European companies at exactly the moment they need it.
Silicon Valley Scale, Not Silicon Valley Assumptions
We have built systems handling 10M+ requests per second. We know the difference between a demo and a production system. European companies deserve the same engineering rigor — without the lock-in, the complexity, or the cultural mismatch of US-first software.
GDPR by Design, Not by Afterthought
Privacy compliance was a constraint we engineered around at Uber — not a legal checkbox at the end. Every system we build starts with data minimization, retention policies, and deletion strategies. DSGVO compliance is not an add-on. It is the architecture.
For regulated financial and health-data clients this comes down to one hard test: does the provider own its metal? A hyperscaler's "EU region" under a local brand is not sovereign — the underlying entity is still reachable under the US CLOUD Act, regardless of where the servers physically sit. Real data sovereignty requires both halves: infrastructure the provider actually owns (datacentres, hardware, network) and an operating entity that is EU-owned and EU-controlled. That is the standard we build to.
German Entity, Berlin-Based
Westover Labs operates as a German UG. Contracts are straightforward for European companies. No currency risk, no cross-border complexity. We are in your timezone, in your regulatory environment, and aligned with how European businesses operate.
We Leave. The System Stays.
Most consultants create dependency. Our engagement model is designed to do the opposite. We build AI infrastructure that keeps working after we leave — documented, trained, and handed off. You own everything. No retainer required. That is the whole point.
How a 3–6 month engagement works.
No retainers, no ambiguity. A fixed arc with defined deliverables at every phase — and a clean handoff when we are done.
Assessment
Audit your current stack, codebase, and team. Identify where AI creates real leverage versus where it adds noise. Produce an architecture decision record.
Build
Design and deploy the AI infrastructure. This is the bulk of the engagement — actual production systems, not prototypes. Your team is in the loop throughout.
Harden
Load testing, observability, runbooks. Identify failure modes before they find you. Documentation that an engineer two years from now can follow.
Handoff
Knowledge transfer sessions with your team. Everything is yours: systems, credentials, runbooks. Optional 30-day post-engagement availability.
What Your Team Keeps After the Engagement
- Production AI infrastructure, fully deployed
- Architecture decision records with rationale
- Runbooks for every system we build together
- CI/CD pipelines with automated testing
- Monitoring and alerting configuration
- Trained team capable of owning everything
One month. You know exactly what you are getting.
Instead of a months-long hiring process: engage us for a trial month. We assess your architecture, start building, and mentor your team. After 30 days you have actual output, not a pitch deck — and a clear read on fit before committing to anything longer.
Full pricing, the week-by-week breakdown, and how it compares to a recruiter search live at westover.expert.
I’m Done With Recruiters.
A recruiter reads a CV. We know what good engineers actually look like — because we hired and retained them at Uber and HERE Technologies across a decade and thousands of microservices.
Direct hiring, no recruiter commission, and no keyword matching — we source, screen, and hire your engineering team ourselves. Sits alongside the Trial Month and Fractional CTO options above as another way to get senior engineering judgment without a full-time hire. Full pricing and package details live at westover.expert.
Ready to replace your next five-year hire with a three-month engagement?
If you have a concrete problem — AI infrastructure that needs building, a team that needs unblocking, a system that needs to actually work in production — let's talk.
Academic researchers: Consulting for university and research institutions is available at reduced or no cost on a discretionary basis. Cost should never be a barrier to good engineering.