# Sujay Rao

> CTO and systems architect who turns ambitious AI ideas into platforms that actually hold up — at scale, under pressure, for real customers.

## Pages

- [Home](https://sujayrao.com/)
- [Writing](https://sujayrao.com/writing)

## Articles

- [The Right Knife for the Right Job: Why Prompt Evaluation Is the New Unit Testing](https://sujayrao.com/writing/the-right-knife-for-the-right-job): You wouldn't use a bread knife to break down a chicken. So why are you using the same model and the same evaluation for every AI task? (March 8, 2026, AI Engineering, Production Engineering)
- [Prompts Don't Age Well: Building an Adaptability Framework for the AI Model Era](https://sujayrao.com/writing/prompts-dont-age-well): Once you've written a good prompt and validated it, you're done — right? That assumption has a shelf life of about three to six months. (March 8, 2026, AI Engineering, Systems Design)
- [The Art of De-escalation](https://sujayrao.com/writing/the-art-of-de-escalation): Knowing when not to panic is one of the most important — and least talked about — engineering skills. A framework for interrogating incidents before mobilizing. (March 2026, Production Engineering, Systems Design)
- [Build to Learn First. Then Build to Last.](https://sujayrao.com/writing/build-to-learn-first-then-build-to-last): Why the most efficient engineering teams prototype before they build — and how to know when to stop. (January 2026, Software Architecture, Prototyping)
- [Observability Is for Debugging Humans, Not Systems](https://sujayrao.com/writing/observability-is-for-debugging-humans-not-systems): Observability is not about seeing systems. It is about reducing human decision latency under failure. (October 2025, Systems Design, DevOps, Production Engineering)
- [Data Contracts and the CMS Problem in React Native](https://sujayrao.com/writing/data-contracts-and-the-cms-problem-in-react-native): Why your content management story falls apart without a contract — and how to build one that holds. (August 2025, Systems Design, Software Architecture, React Native)
- [Picking the Right AI Model Is an Engineering Decision, Not a Preference](https://sujayrao.com/writing/picking-the-right-ai-model-is-an-engineering-decision): On deterministic vs generative AI, choosing between providers, and why the use case has to come first. (June 2025, AI Engineering, Systems Design)
- [What AI Evaluation Actually Is — and Why Prompt Engineering Is Inseparable from It](https://sujayrao.com/writing/what-ai-evaluation-actually-is): Most teams skip evals until something breaks in production. That's the expensive way to learn. (May 2025, AI Engineering, Production Engineering)

## Contact

- Email: me@sujayrao.com
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/suj26/