About
A small practice, deliberately.
I’m Jaladhi Desai, and Emplific is my practice.
Seventeen years in software. Nine of them at Optuno as Project Manager, leading a 30+ person cross-functional team – engineers, designers, QA, support – fully remote, across timezones, since 2017. Before that, four years building product remotely with a US startup later acquired by Buffer, and commercial software used by more than 700 customers at a 4.5 out of 5 average rating.
I hold a Master of Data Science in AI and machine learning from Deakin University in Melbourne, and a postgraduate program in AI and machine learning from UT Austin’s McCombs School of Business.
I came to AI from delivery rather than from research, and that shapes what I build. I’ve spent most of my career answering for whether something shipped, worked, and kept working – which is a different discipline from making a model perform well in a notebook.
Emplific is built around senior attention rather than headcount, and that’s a deliberate choice rather than a stage I’m in a hurry to grow out of.
The person who scopes your engagement is the person who designs the system and writes the code. Nothing is sold by one team and delivered by a cheaper one. There’s no margin structure that depends on billing juniors against a senior sales conversation. Specialists come in for specific pieces when a project genuinely needs them.
The honest trade: capacity is limited, and sometimes the answer is that I can’t start when you need me to. I’d rather say that than staff your project with people you never met.
What I believe about this work.
If a person can’t inspect, correct or override the output, it isn’t ready for a business to depend on, however good the demo was.
Every engagement begins with a baseline, because “we added AI” isn’t a result and nobody should pay for one.
Some results take time, some depend on things outside anyone’s control, and some ideas should be killed. I’ll say so, including when it costs me the work.
Audit trails, retention policy and approval gates cost a fraction to design in versus retrofit. Nearly every stalled AI project I’ve seen stalled at this gate.
Documentation and handover are part of every engagement. If you come back, it should be for the next problem.
Alongside client work, I build and operate SwiftURL – a compliance-grade link infrastructure platform in production. Branded links, SDK-free mobile deep linking, privacy-preserving analytics that store no personal data, and an append-only audit log with cryptographic chaining.
Running my own product keeps me honest. It’s one thing to recommend an architecture; it’s another to be the person woken up when it fails.
Visit SwiftURL →Based in India. Remote for fourteen years, leading distributed teams for nine, so distance is well-tested rather than an experiment. Full overlap with European working hours, and the first half of the US East Coast day. Clients across the US, Europe and India.
