AI performance engineering for startups

Ship faster AI products with measurable quality, lower latency, safer agents, and predictable inference cost.

We help AI-native teams find production blockers across evals, retrieval, model choice, serving architecture, GPU utilization, sandboxing, regression checks, and provider strategy.

Pain points

Quality issues block launches

Teams ship promising demos, then stall when hallucinations, retrieval misses, weak eval coverage, and edge-case regressions appear in production.

Latency and cost creep upward

Serving architecture, batching, routing, cold starts, provider mix, and GPU utilization quietly decide whether the product feels fast and margin-positive.

Agents expand the blast radius

Code execution, file access, user-generated code, tools, and agentic workflows need strong boundaries before they become customer-facing reliability or security risks.

Industry evidence we build around

Evals are production infrastructure

AI products need repeatable quality gates for retrieval, tool use, summarization, extraction, reasoning, refusal behavior, and user-visible regressions.

Inference architecture shapes margin

Model choice, batching, caching, routing, GPU utilization, provider failover, and observability determine product responsiveness and cost per request.

Agent safety needs real containment

Sandboxed file and code execution, scoped permissions, audit logs, test fixtures, and abuse-case coverage help agent products move beyond prototype risk.

Top 5 use cases

AI performance and evals audit

Finds where quality, latency, cost, retrieval, model choice, or eval coverage is blocking production readiness.

Inference and GPU optimization build

Optimizes serving architecture, batching, model routing, cold starts, cost per request, GPU utilization, and observability.

Safe agent sandbox system

Secures code and file execution for agents, analysts, user-generated code, AI coding products, and internal automation tools.

Production AI reliability retainer

Runs ongoing evals, benchmark checks, regression reviews, cost analysis, and model/provider update planning.

RAG and retrieval quality gates

Builds test sets, retrieval metrics, source-grounding checks, and release gates for production search and answer workflows.

Before and after

Before

The team ships features by feel, manually inspects outputs, watches latency and spend drift, and reacts to production regressions after customers notice.

After

The product has eval suites, benchmark runs, cost-per-request visibility, routing strategy, sandbox boundaries, and release gates tied to production risk.

Privacy and auditability

Private data boundaries

Sensitive workflows can use hosted private-cloud inference, dedicated cloud or VPC deployment, or local/on-prem inference when customer data, prompts, code, or files cannot leave your environment.

Predictable AI costs

Avoid billing surprises with clear workflow-based packages. We do not penalize you for using more AI like other vendors.

Preserve your operating know-how

Every system can include benchmark history, eval results, trace IDs, model/provider decisions, sandbox events, reviewer notes, and deployment history.

30-day pilot

1. Pick one repeatable workflow

We choose one production bottleneck: eval coverage, inference cost, latency, retrieval quality, agent sandboxing, or release reliability.

2. Build with proof and approvals

We build the audit, eval harness, optimization path, sandbox design, or benchmark loop needed to make the risk measurable.

3. Measure the decision

You get quality, latency, cost, reliability, and safety metrics plus a roadmap for the next production hardening step.

Armen Donigian, founder of Performance AI Lab

Armen Donigian

Founder, Performance AI Lab | Former Meta SuperIntelligence Lab

With 25 years in software engineering and enterprise infrastructure, I've built systems for some of the world's most demanding environments. I founded Performance AI Lab to bring private, auditable AI workflows that reduce manual work and preserve operating know-how to mid-market operators.

Frequently Asked Questions

Find the AI production bottleneck worth fixing first.

If quality, latency, inference cost, eval coverage, retrieval, or agent safety is slowing the roadmap, we can help harden the system.

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Performance AI Lab

Private AI workflows for the work that falls between your documents, apps, approvals, and operating knowledge.

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