Shaaf Kashan

Shaaf Kashan

AI Architect, London

I design AI systems and build them end to end, from the architecture decisions to the integrations, data boundaries and guardrails that let them run on real data.

I work forward-deployed: I start from the problem, decide what the AI should and shouldn't touch, then write the code that makes it work where it runs, from the model routing and retrieval to the integrations and guardrails.

Credentials

  • First-Class BSc CS (AI), Brunel
  • MSc Technology Management, UCL
  • Claude Certified Architect (Professional)

Case studies

  • FRIDAY: Personal build: local-first AI assistant. Deciding, request by request, what is allowed to leave my Mac, and making sure the system actually follows that rule.
  • AI operating layer: Personal build: the setup I run my own work on. Letting AI work on almost 10,000 of my own notes every day without pasting them into chats, and without trusting a prompt to keep the rules.
  • TerraGrid: Final-year project: AI and blockchain property platform. Making a React frontend, an ML valuation model and a blockchain ledger behave like one product instead of three integrations side by side.
  • WealthSphere: Group project: financial planning platform. Putting budgeting, investment tracking and financial learning in one place that someone non-technical could actually use.
  • SWIFTBOT: First-year group project: robotics & software engineering in Java. Taking a robot task from requirements through design to a working Java implementation as a group.

Putting AI into a real environment

Four questions a security reviewer asks, answered from systems I have built.

What data leaves?

From FRIDAY's first version: context tagged private stayed on the local model. The cloud path refused by default, and private tags were set by hand, never guessed.

Who can see what?

From FRIDAY's first version: conversation history was kept in an encrypted store (SQLCipher), and the desktop app talked to the assistant over an authenticated local connection.

How does it fail?

FRIDAY's first version defaulted to deny. In TerraGrid, a chain gateway isolates blockchain complexity from the rest of the platform. On this site, the contact form is rate-limited and falls back to a mailto link when the backend is down.

How do you prove it?

FRIDAY's first version wrote an HMAC-chained, tamper-evident audit log. One lesson I kept: a governance rule passed its tests while doing nothing in the running app, because it was never wired in. This site ships a content security policy, a host-simulation check before each deploy and a test suite.

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