About
We build the AI systems that actually ship.
Jstar Tech Consulting is an engineering-first AI consultancy. We help teams move from prototype to production — and stay there.
Who we are
Operator-led, not consultant-led.
Most AI consulting firms bring theory. We bring shipped systems. Our principal, Jos Santz, has spent more than a decade inside engineering organizations at Amazon, Sony, City National Bank, Edmunds, American Honda, and IBM Global Services — building distributed systems, payments infrastructure, and AI features that hold up under real load.
That experience shows up in the work. We don’t draft glossy roadmaps and disappear. We write the code, deploy the infrastructure, and own the on-call rotation until the system is stable.
What we believe
Four principles we hold the line on.
Production discipline beats demo polish.
A chatbot that looks great in a screen recording but falls over the first time a real user hits it is worse than no AI feature at all.
Local-first when it makes sense.
On-device inference protects privacy, lowers latency, and cuts API spend. We pick where the model runs based on the problem, not the trend.
Agents need guardrails, not freedom.
Tool-use through narrow, auditable action tags ships safer than handing the model a code interpreter.
Observability is non-negotiable.
If you can’t see what the model just did, you can’t debug it. We build for visibility from day one.
Where we work
Los Angeles · remote across US time zones.
We take on a small number of engagements at a time — enough to give each client real depth, not slide decks.