AI Engineering Studio

We build AI systems
that actually ship.

Production-grade AI features, agentic workflow automation, and deep system integration — delivered in 2–6 week cycles with measurable outcomes. No enterprise theater, no locked-in retainers.

What We Do

Core Services

Focused engagements built around your problem. We scope tight, ship fast, and hand you something your team can own and operate.

Full-Stack AI Engineering

End-to-end AI feature development: data pipelines, inference APIs, and clean production UIs in a single engagement. We design around agentic patterns from the start — tool-use, function-calling, structured outputs, and observable trace logging so you can see exactly what your model is doing. Scoped to 2–6 week iterations with hard acceptance criteria, not open-ended retainers. Every output is traceable, testable, and handed off with evals in place.

Data Insights & Analytics

KPI dashboards, forecasting models, and anomaly detection — replacing spreadsheet workflows with real-time intelligence. We build hybrid retrieval pipelines that combine vector search (pgvector, Qdrant) with relational joins, so queries stay fast and answers stay grounded. Ingest from CRMs, ERPs, and file stores; normalize and enrich into a clean data layer. Observability via Langfuse or Helicone so you track cost-per-query from day one, not as an afterthought.

Workflow Orchestration

Multi-agent pipelines that take real actions: submitting forms, updating records, sending notifications — with human-in-the-loop approval gates at every decision point that matters. Built on MCP (Model Context Protocol) or composable function-calling steps, with a full audit trail on every automated action. Event-driven where it makes sense, polling-based where it’s simpler. We don’t over-engineer the orchestration layer just to make it look impressive.

Documentation & Onboarding

Plain-English guides, role-based runbooks, and in-product AI help that cites exact source passages — not hallucinated summaries. We build AI-powered onboarding assistants backed by your actual documentation: SOPs, contracts, spec sheets. Users ask in natural language and get an answer with a direct link to the source. Built on RAG pipelines with retrieval evals so the accuracy degrades loudly, not silently, when your docs change.

Platform & Integration

Cloud-native or on-prem: we wire AI features into existing infrastructure without blowing up your architecture. Supabase for data, Cloudflare Workers or Deno for edge compute, zero-trust identity patterns, CI/CD with feature flags for incremental rollout. CRM, ERP, and legacy API integration handled — REST, GraphQL, or file-based. We've seen the gnarly stuff. API gateway patterns, rate limiting, multi-tenant data isolation: all handled before the first production incident.

In-House Generative AI

Private model hosting, RAG pipelines, eval frameworks, guardrails, and smart model routing — all inside your own infrastructure. We design BYOK (Bring Your Own Keys) and local-first architectures for teams that can’t send data to third-party APIs. Model routing done right: cheap models handle classification and extraction; reasoning models (o3, Claude with extended thinking) only engage when the problem warrants the cost. Cost-per-token tracked from the start, not discovered on the first invoice.

How We Work

The Engagement Model

Short cycles, honest scope, clean handoffs. No surprises at invoice time.

  1. 01

    Discover

    We talk to the people who actually do the work, not just the stakeholders. We read the spreadsheets, watch the demos, understand where time is lost. Output: a one-page problem statement everyone agrees on before anything is scoped.

  2. 02

    Define

    Scope, data access, success criteria. What does "working" look like? What accuracy threshold matters? What integrations are in play? We write it down and both parties sign off before a line of code is written.

  3. 03

    Prototype

    A working demo against real data in under two weeks. Not a slide, not a wireframe — something you can click through and critique. We’d rather surface problems at prototype than discover them at launch.

  4. 04

    Pilot

    Controlled rollout to real users. We instrument everything: usage metrics, error rates, model cost, user satisfaction. Iterate based on real signal, not assumptions. This is where we earn or lose trust.

  5. 05

    Scale & Hand-off

    We document everything: architecture decisions, runbooks, eval datasets, deployment configs. Your team can operate and extend the system without us. We bow out or stay on a light SLA — your call.

Use Cases

What This Looks Like in Practice

Specific problems, specific solutions. Production systems — not demos.

Agentic Automation

Permit & Compliance Workflow Agents

AI agents that extract structured data from PDFs and scanned forms, populate submission portals, track status via API, and surface exceptions to a human reviewer — with a complete audit trail. Replaces a spreadsheet-and-email workflow that consumed hours daily. The agent handles the routine; a human handles the edge cases.

Document Intelligence

Contract & Spec RAG Search

A private RAG pipeline over your contracts, specs, and SOPs. Teams ask questions in plain English and get grounded answers with exact citations. Built with retrieval evals so accuracy degrades loudly, not silently. Deployed inside your VPC — data never leaves your environment. Saves hours of manual document hunting per week per person.

Operational Intelligence

Live KPIs from Messy Data Sources

Ingest from CRMs, ERPs, and exported CSVs into a clean data layer, then surface real-time KPIs with forecasting and anomaly alerts. AI-assisted normalization handles the edge cases that break traditional ETL. Your team sees actuals, not stale reports from last Tuesday. Cost and schedule variance flagged before they become problems.

Human-in-the-Loop

AI-Prescreened Approval Flows

AI pre-screens incoming requests — classifying, extracting fields, flagging risks — and routes to the right human reviewer with context pre-populated. Reviewers approve or reject in one click; the agent takes the next action automatically. Audit log captures every decision, human or automated, with timestamps and reasoning.

What You Keep

Full Ownership, No Lock-in

When the engagement ends, you own everything. We’re not interested in building dependencies.

Source Code & Repo

Full git history, documented and structured for your team to extend without calling us.

Infrastructure as Code

Deployment configs, CI/CD pipelines, environment setup — reproducible from scratch.

Eval Datasets & Benchmarks

Test cases for your AI features so you know when a model update breaks something before users do.

Runbooks & Architecture Docs

Plain-English ops guides. Your on-call engineer can handle incidents without calling us.

Observability Dashboards

Usage metrics, cost tracking, error rates — instrumented from day one, not bolted on later.

Optional Light SLA

We can stay on for monitoring and incident response, or you go fully independent. Either works.

Products

Software We Ship for Ourselves

We build tools under the Q7 Core banner. Real tools, real customers.

Live

SteelTrap

AI chat client with built-in DevTools. Bring your own keys, access 400+ models, and keep your data private. No subscriptions, no lock-in.

steeltrap.io
Coming soon

More in progress

We build software for clients and ourselves. More products ship when they’re ready — not when they’re just presentable.

About & Contact

Let’s Build Something

Q7 Core is a small engineering studio. Small team, focused scope, fast cycles. We've shipped production AI systems for clients in construction tech, legal, and operations — and we know what separates a demo that impresses from a system that works at 2am on a Tuesday.

We work best with teams that have a real problem and are ready to move. Not with teams looking for a vendor to manage. If that’s you, let’s talk.

Ready to start?

connect@q7core.com

We typically respond within one business day. No sales process, no discovery call prerequisite — just a conversation about your problem.