Principal · Scintara Labs

Max Jensen

Building custom AI systems for real technical problems

The work I'm best at is translation. A client describes what they need in plain language (a question they can't field-test, a decision that has to be defensible) and I turn it into a quantitative system that answers the actual question, built to their specification rather than fitted to a template. Most of the difficulty in this work sits in that gap, not in the code.

I studied computer science at Cornell and finance at Vanderbilt, so I think about compute, time and budget the way the people funding a project do. I'm responsive, and I work in the open. You see the reasoning as it's built, not just the result at the end, so you can tell whether the thing being built is actually the thing you need.

Why work with me

The person you talk to on the first call is the person who writes the code, and stays the person you talk to after delivery. Nothing gets handed to a bench, and you never explain your problem twice.

Background

Special Government Employee, 2026

Appointed as a Special Government Employee supporting the National Commission on the Future of the Navy.

Cornell University

BS, Computer Science, with a minor in Business. Four years of varsity baseball, three as captain, the first three-year captain in the program's history, and twice All-Ivy.

Vanderbilt University

MS, Finance. Owen Graduate School of Management.

Practice

Agentic AI systems: multi-agent architectures, retrieval over curated source libraries, and the orchestration that holds them together. Python, SQL, Linux, and the LLM and agent tooling around them.

Engagements run in two shapes, and every one is scoped so it can stop. How engagements are structured

What I won't build

Agents that make wartime decisions where human life is the cost.

The systems I build are for analysis and training. They run on unclassified, published material and connect to nothing operational. Their job is to help people think through a decision before they have to make it, and those limits are what make them safe to bring into the room.

If you're holding a question that can't be field-tested, start with an email: maxjensen@scintaralabs.com