OptyxStack

AI Cost & Reliability Engineering

Fix wrong answers, cost spikes, and release regressions in production LLM systems

For teams running RAG, copilots, or agents in production, OptyxStack audits the system, isolates failure modes, ships targeted fixes, and gives leadership before/after evidence.

Audit - Sprint - RetainerRoot-cause > opinionPRs shipped, not decks
$3.8k audit entry point5-14 days to baseline, findings, and roadmap24h response time

Featured project

tactasai.com

AI workflow and prompt tooling for production teams.

Signal 01

Baseline before opinions

Leadership gets one scorecard before the team debates prompts, models, vendors, or retrievers.

Signal 02

Fixes ranked by ROI

Recommendations are sequenced by quality impact, cost effect, engineering effort, and rollout risk.

Signal 03

Release confidence after

Regression gates turn one-off improvements into a repeatable release process.

Why enterprise teams get stuck

We understand your pain

Without evals and monitoring, you can't separate failures in retrieval, prompting, tools, or the model. We run a second-opinion audit, quantify the gap, and produce a decision-ready recovery plan.

Common failure surfaces

The problem is usually not “the model”

Retrieval

Recall benchmark + rerank tuning

Answerable queries still miss the right evidence.

Prompting

Prompt compression + routing policy

Prompt bloat increases spend without improving quality.

Tools

Trace review + fallback design

Tool calls succeed technically but fail user intent.

Model

Cohort scoring + policy updates

Model selection drifts away from cost-quality target.

4

Failure layers isolated: retrieval, prompt, tools, model

$3.8k

Fixed-scope audit starting point

5-14

Working days to baseline and decision memo

24h

Initial response window

Scope is transparent up front: audit first, sprint only when the baseline supports it, governance only when your team needs ongoing control.

NDA · Least-privilege · No customer data for training
You keep the evals, dashboards, and runbooks

How it works

Start with an AI Production Audit. If the data supports action, move into a focused Optimization Sprint. Keep governance only when ongoing drift risk justifies it.

011–2 weeks

AI Production Audit

Baseline the system: quality score, cost per conversation, retrieval hit rate, latency, and failure modes.

Deliverables

  • Baseline metrics
  • Failure analysis
  • ROI roadmap
Start with the audit
024–6 weeks

Optimization Sprint (4–6 weeks)

Focus on the highest-value fixes. Ship PRs and verify before/after changes across quality, cost, and reliability.

Deliverables

  • Production PRs
  • Before/after benchmarks
  • Eval harness
Explore the sprint
03monthly

Reliability Retainer

Keep evals, monitoring, regression tests, tuning, and incident triage active after the main fixes land.

Deliverables

  • Monitoring dashboards
  • Regression gates
  • Incident triage
See the retainer

Quality, cost, reliability—measured

We baseline the system first, then measure the deltas after fixes. You keep everything: code, evals, dashboards, runbooks.

Model-agnostic. Works with OpenAI / Anthropic / Gemini / Bedrock / Azure OpenAI + your vector DB.

Quality

Make answers grounded

Measured

Groundedness score, citation checks, human review where needed, and RAG retrieval/reranking fixes.

Cost

Reduce cost per conversation

Benchmarked

Baseline and post-fix cost per conversation using routing, caching, context trimming, and retry control.

Reliability

Prevent regressions

Controlled

Change control, regression gates, release checks, and drift signals for prompts, models, tools, and retrieval.

What you get

We ship PRs—not decks.

  • Eval harness + golden set template
  • Dashboard: cost/latency/quality + error taxonomy
  • Root-cause analysis + ROI roadmap
  • PRs shipped (prompt/RAG/routing/caching/serving)
  • Regression gates in CI
  • Runbook + handoff session
LLM governance dashboard: quality composite, groundedness, cost per token, P95 latency, regression gates

Sample deliverables. Actual format tailored to your stack.

Enterprise use cases across finance, legal, healthcare, support

Best fit: enterprises running LLMs/RAG/agents in production with accuracy, reliability, cost, or drift pain.

Good fit

Recommended

  • Finance, legal, healthcare: RAG/copilot with grounded answers & compliance
  • Support: chatbot wrong answers—recovery + eval gates
  • Vendor-built systems needing second-opinion audit
  • Teams willing to measure outcomes and ship fixes

Not a fit

No action needed

  • AI strategy decks or model training from scratch
  • Tool setup only (no system diagnosis)
  • No production usage yet
  • Not willing to measure outcomes

Benchmark examples: accuracy, reliability, cost per successful task

The audit format is simple: baseline the system, ship targeted fixes, verify the change with benchmarks.

Benchmark style

Representative before/after signals, not promises or vanity metrics.

What changes

Quality, cost, and release confidence move together or the fix is incomplete.

What stays

Artifacts, evals, dashboards, and operating logic remain with your team.

Audit snapshot

Support copilot (B2B SaaS)

benchmark-led

Groundedness

68% -> 91%

Escalation rate

18% -> 7%

Retrieval hit rate

61% -> 88%

Context: RAG wrong answers despite docs containing the info.

Constraint: Retrieval failure modes, no golden set.

Fix shipped: Golden set + eval harness, retrieval/rerank fixes, verification for high-risk answers.

Representative audit snapshot format. Actual baselines are measured from your system.

Audit snapshot

Internal assistant (Enterprise)

benchmark-led

Cost / conversation

$0.042 -> $0.021

Pass rate

72% -> 89%

Release risk

manual -> gated

Context: Token spend spiked after prompt changes; quality regressed.

Constraint: Prompt bloat, no caching, no regression gates.

Fix shipped: Context trimming + caching, routing policy by cost/quality, regression gates in CI.

Representative audit snapshot format. Actual baselines are measured from your system.

More case studies

AI Production Audit: Why a Support Copilot Was Wrong, Slow, and Expensive

A support copilot was drawing complaints from every direction: wrong answers, slow responses, and rising spend. In five working days, we turned anecdotal pain into a measured baseline, isolated the dominant failure modes, and delivered a fix order the team could finally trust.

View details

Hardening a Production RAG System Against Prompt Injection (Without Breaking UX)

A production RAG assistant blended untrusted user text, retrieved content, and tool capabilities inside one decision path. We rebuilt trust boundaries across prompt, retrieval, tool, and output layers with immutable policy separation, capability-scoped tools, citation-gated answers, isolated execution, and attack-suite validation. Representative injection and exfiltration paths were blocked without forcing normal users into brittle refusals.

View details

Privacy-Safe LLM Observability: Debuggable Logs Without Storing PII

Logging for eval and debug meant storing PII—compliance blocked it. We built a redaction pipeline, hashing, sampling, access controls, retention policy, and synthetic replay sets for eval. Result: debuggable logs, no PII in storage, compliance review passed.

View details

Frequently asked questions

Audit scope, RAG failures, hallucination measurement, vendor systems, and data access. We work with least-privilege access and can operate under NDA on redacted data.

What does the AI Production Audit include?

A fixed-scope baseline of quality, cost, latency, retrieval behavior, and regression risk. The handoff includes findings, a failure map, prioritized fixes, and a decision memo your engineering and leadership teams can use.

Why is our RAG not working in production?

Usually it is retrieval quality, chunking, embedding mismatch, ranking, missing evals, or production drift. We isolate the failure mode before recommending prompt, retrieval, model, or tooling changes.

How do you measure hallucination rate?

We define a groundedness and correctness rubric, build or improve a golden set, then run human review or LLM-as-judge where appropriate. The important part is repeatability: the same checks should catch future regressions.

Can you audit a vendor-built AI system?

Yes. We run second-opinion audits on vendor-built systems: baseline performance, identify root causes, and provide a recovery plan. If your team controls the code or configuration, we can also scope PR-level fixes.

Do you need production access or customer data?

No. We can operate on staging, redacted datasets, or sample conversations. Read-only logs and metrics are typically sufficient—and no customer data is used to train models.

What happens after the audit?

If the baseline shows clear ROI, we can scope an Optimization Sprint. If the fix is small, your team can use the roadmap directly. If ongoing drift is the main risk, a retainer may make sense.

Fixed-scope entry point

Ready to baseline your system?

Fixed-scope audit. Response within 24 hours.

Audit scope

1-2 weeks to baseline the system

Decision memo with prioritized fixes

Optional sprint if the data supports it