Roadmap
What to build, what to buy, what to defer. A sequence the CEO and CTO can defend, not a backlog of demos.
Fractional Head of AI · Building AlexandrIA
François Paupier
I own the AI vision for post-seed product companies, and I make it real in production.
How a mandate works · typically 1-2 days/week · capacity intentionally limited
- 1-2 days/week Typical cadence
- Monthly retainer Ongoing ownership
- Limited capacity A very small number of mandates
- 30-min diagnostic Free, no commitment
Who this is for
A fit if
- You are the CEO or CTO of a post-seed product company. You already have a product, not a pitch.
- AI is stuck on the CTO’s plate, competing with everything else that has to ship.
- You need someone who can own the vision and make production choices: models, serving, evals, data, hosting.
- Constraints are real: EU-sovereign cloud, on-prem, or air-gapped. Or you simply need RAG, agents, and observability that hold up in production.
Not a fit if
- You want a slide deck, a workshop, or “AI strategy” with no delivery.
- You are an SME in distribution or logistics, not a post-seed product company.
- You are still at idea stage, with no product and no users.
- You need a full-time hire tomorrow, or a team to staff a research lab.
What a mandate looks like
You get a counterpart, not a vendor. Roadmap, stack, production, and an exec cadence. Typically one to two days a week, on a monthly retainer. Pricing on demand, set on the diagnostic.
Stack
Models, serving, evals, and observability. LiteLLM, vLLM, Langfuse, OpenTelemetry, chosen for production, not a blog post.
Delivery
RAG, multi-agent orchestration, LLM-as-judge evals. On-prem and air-gapped copilots when the constraint is real.
Cadence
A senior seat next to the CEO/CTO. Decisions get made. Systems ship. You are not left with a PDF.
Proof
- AlexandrIA, in production. Founder & CTO of AlexandrIA, a research co-pilot with visual knowledge maps, billing, EU-sovereign hosting on OVHcloud and Scaleway, and recurring paying users. Built end-to-end: multi-agent orchestration, RAG, LLM-as-judge evals, Langfuse.
- Production systems for clients. AI lead on on-prem and air-gapped copilots: vLLM, LiteLLM, Keycloak, knowledge graphs.
- Teaching. Guest Lecturer, LLM Pretraining & Post-training, SCAI (Sorbonne Université) and Centrale Nantes. Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA).
- Selected talks. TensorFlow World 2019, AGIR 2024, Gendarmerie panel, Qonto HQ 2025, LLM sovereignty course, Centrale Nantes 2025.
Current stack
What I work in: LLM, RAG, agents, vLLM, LiteLLM, EU-sovereign.
- TypeScript
- Next.js
- Python
- FastAPI
- LiteLLM
- vLLM
- Langfuse
- OpenTelemetry
- Postgres
- Supabase
- Docker
- Kubernetes
- Ansible
- GitHub Actions
- OVHcloud
- Scaleway
- Cloudflare
Book a 30-minute diagnostic
Free, no commitment. We check fit. I take a very small number of mandates. Pricing on demand, set on the diagnostic.
About
I am a founder in Paris. I graduated from École Centrale de Nantes with an MSc in Signal Processing & Statistics (top 10%). I build production AI systems, and I teach the parts that are easy to get wrong.
Day to day I am Founder & CTO of AlexandrIA. On the side I take a very small number of Fractional Head of AI mandates. I also lead AI on client production systems when the constraint is on-prem or air-gapped.
I lecture on LLM pretraining and post-training at SCAI (Sorbonne Université) and Centrale Nantes. From 2020 to 2024 I produced and hosted Post Mortem (24 episodes, currently on hold).