About
A specialist firm.
Senior engineers only.
Built to ship.
OptiSyn is an AI engineering firm based in McLean, Virginia. We build production AI systems for defense and enterprise. Scoped, built, and deployed in ninety days.
We don't sell strategy. We don't sell pilots. We build systems that run and we stand behind them with a simple guarantee: if the system isn't in production at the end of the engagement, the engagement is free.
We take three engagements per quarter. That constraint is deliberate. It keeps the principal engineer in every project. It keeps the work honest. It's why our clients come back.
Founder
Jacob Hicks
Founder, Principal Engineer, Managing Member
Eight years building AI systems inside the enterprise. Master's in Data Science, Texas A&M. Marine Corps veteran. Active TS/SCI.
Our team has sat in the rooms where major initiatives got shelved because nobody planned for ATO. That's the specific failure mode OptiSyn exists to prevent.
Principles
Six rules the firm runs on.
Ship or it's free.
Every engagement closes in production. If the system doesn't run, the invoice doesn't either.
Build for real data.
We refuse sandbox-only engagements. We work inside your environment, under your constraints, from week one.
Senior-level, every project.
You get the principal. Not a junior team and an offshore bench. Three engagements per quarter means three engagements.
Plan for what goes wrong.
Failure modes are identified before deployment. Monitoring is in place before launch. Nothing ships without a rollback path.
Transfer ownership.
When we leave, you own the system completely. Runbooks, tests, observability. No lock-in. No retainer traps.
Keep the firm small.
We don't scale by hiring. We scale by saying no.
SDVOSB Certified · TS/SCI Active · DoD & Federal Experience · MS Data Science, Texas A&M · Marine Corps Veteran · 8+ Years Production AI