Chayan Rellan

Chayan Rellan

Applied AI engineer. Agentic systems, LLM products, MCP.

VP, AI & Data at AlixPartners · New York

About

Applied AI engineer with 4+ years designing, building, and owning production LLM products and agentic AI systems, from rapid prototype through deployment, evaluation, and monitoring in live enterprise environments.

Currently at AlixPartners in New York, where I ship agentic RAG platforms and Model Context Protocol integrations for enterprise clients. Before that: data science consulting at Sia Partners, and a master's in robotics & AI at Columbia. I work directly with stakeholders to turn AI opportunities into deployed tools that cut manual processes from weeks to hours.

Browse my work →

Work

Production AI systems architected and delivered for enterprise clients. Clients are anonymized, but the outcomes are real.

AlixPartners · Private equity clients

Agentic M&A Due Diligence Platform

ProblemM&A due diligence means analysts manually going through data rooms, like headcount files, vendor lists, and financials, under tight deal deadlines.

BuiltArchitected and shipped a Generative AI platform where agents run agentic RAG workflows: multi-step reasoning, planning, and tool execution across headcount analysis, vendor mapping, and peer benchmarking.

ImpactIn production with private equity clients, automating diligence work that used to be fully manual.

AlixPartners · Platform infrastructure

MCP Integrations for Enterprise Agents

ProblemAgents needed access to a growing set of internal and external data sources and services. Each one needed custom integration code that was hard to standardize or reuse.

BuiltBuilt Model Context Protocol (MCP) integrations connecting AI agents to enterprise data sources and services, giving every agent one standard way to discover and call tools.

ImpactStandardized tool use across the due diligence platform. New data sources plug in through one protocol instead of one-off integrations.

AlixPartners · Procurement org, $3.5B annual spend

GenAI Contract Lifecycle Platform

ProblemProcurement teams reviewed contracts by hand: classification, clause-by-clause reading, and redlining. Each cycle took weeks.

BuiltDesigned and shipped a contract lifecycle management platform; owned prompt and system design, retrieval, and extraction quality, iterating on evaluations in production across contract classification, clause extraction, and AI-driven redlining.

ImpactCut contract review cycles from weeks to hours for a client with $3.5B in annual spend.

AlixPartners · Customer service operations

LLM Call-Analytics Application

ProblemRecurring service issues were buried in customer calls that no team had the capacity to listen to and categorize.

BuiltPrototyped and productionized a speech-to-text call-analytics application, using LLMs to surface and group recurring service issues from transcribed customer calls.

ImpactTurned raw call audio into an actionable issue feed, driving customer satisfaction improvements.

AlixPartners · National restaurant chain

ML Store-Performance Program

ProblemWhich stores underperform, what a closure actually does to revenue, and what the franchise contracts actually say. Three questions that used to be answered by gut feel.

BuiltDelivered an ML program combining classification models for store performance, causal modeling of closure impact on revenue, and LLM-based extraction of terms from franchise contracts.

ImpactStore performance and closure decisions backed by models and extracted contract terms instead of intuition.

Sia Partners · Enterprise search

Domain-Tuned Retrieval Backend

ProblemOff-the-shelf embeddings missed domain vocabulary, and AI answers without source pointers couldn't be audited.

BuiltFine-tuned a domain-specific embedding model with QLoRA and built a large-scale retrieval backend on Elasticsearch and Pinecone, with page-level metadata attached to every indexed chunk.

ImpactEvery AI answer stayed traceable to its source page, giving auditable retrieval at scale.

Sia Partners · ESG reporting

ESG Compliance Platform

ProblemCompliance work depended on large volumes of unstructured ESG reports that had to be read and structured manually.

BuiltBuilt a cloud-based ESG compliance platform with a scalable OCR pipeline on AWS Textract, automating extraction and structuring of unstructured reports.

ImpactManual document processing replaced with an automated pipeline that scales with report volume.

Sia Partners · Data platform

SAP → Snowflake Data Migration

ProblemBusiness-critical data had to move from SAP to a modern warehouse without silently corrupting anything on the way.

BuiltDelivered an end-to-end SAP → Matillion → Snowflake migration, with validation and error handling built into the pipeline.

ImpactData quality and pipeline reliability protected through the cutover.

Personal

What I build nights and weekends: agentic systems, shipped end to end, with the guardrails written in code.

Claude Code plugin · MCP server

Routly: AI Travel Agent for Claude Code

Type /plan-trip a week in Lisbon for 2, $3,000 budget and Routly interviews you for missing details, researches the destination, proposes a multi-stop route with real drive times, searches live flights and hotels (Duffel), restaurants (Google Places), and national parks (NPS), builds a cart with a running total, checks out against a Stripe-saved card in test mode, emails confirmations, and writes a day-by-day ITINERARY.md with confirmation numbers.

Under the hood: a custom MCP server exposing 40+ tools over stdio, 17 specialist subagents, slash-command workflows, Supabase auth with per-user AES-256-GCM-encrypted API keys, and graceful fallback to web search for any provider you skip.

Autonomous trading bot · Claude Code cloud routines

Paper Trader: Rules-Based Trading Bot

A disciplined, emotionless investor that runs every weekday morning as a scheduled Claude Code cloud routine. No laptop required. It holds a 75/25 mix: a diversified group of hand-picked stocks screened by trend and risk-adjusted momentum, plus an ETF safety net (SPY, Treasuries, gold) that rotates to T-bills when trends break. Strategy settings are frozen on purpose, so there is no learning loop that could overfit a few dozen trades.

Every order passes a hard-coded constitution before submission, every run is logged as JSON, and a risk-adjusted report card (Sharpe, drawdown, volatility, and fill rate, each compared to SPY) keeps the scorekeeping honest. Paper money only, by constitution. Full anatomy below.

Anatomy

The same rules, every day, enforced in code. The bot cannot talk itself into breaking them.

Constitution-enforced

Every order is checked against code/constitution.py before submission: paper endpoint only, LIMIT and DAY orders only, position and frequency caps, and a denylist. If the code says no, the trade does not happen.

No reason, no trade

Every trade is a JSON file carrying a written reason and its main risk before it can be submitted. No reason means the trade is rejected.

Sells before it's sorry

A stock closing below its 50-day average is sold. SPY below its 200-day average exits stock-picking entirely. A 15% drawdown from peak rotates the book to T-bills.

Frozen parameters

No learning loop, on purpose. Tuning a strategy on a few dozen trades fits noise, not skill. Settings change by hand, with a reason, and get re-tested on paper.

Honest accounting

Every run reconciles with Alpaca. An expired LIMIT order is recorded as what actually happened, not assumed to have filled. Results are judged on Sharpe and drawdown versus SPY, not raw return.

Kill switch

A .HALT_TRADING file at the repo root halts all new orders, no questions asked. The bot logs the halt and stands down. It never deletes the file itself.

Pipeline

One module, one job. Only the executor talks to Alpaca, and the constitution sits in front of it as a veto gate.

Signals

signals.py: trend checks against 50-day and 200-day averages, relative strength versus SPY, and risk-adjusted momentum ranking.

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Engine

engine.py: builds the 75/25 target book, stocks weighted by inverse volatility plus an SPY, Treasuries, and gold safety net, with sector and correlation limits.

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Autopilot

autopilot.py: turns targets into trade JSON files in state/pending_trades/, each with a written reason and risk.

Constitution

constitution.py: the veto gate. Paper endpoint only, LIMIT and DAY orders only, position caps, daily spend caps, and frequency caps. A reject is final.

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Executor

alpaca_client.py: the only path to Alpaca. Submits LIMIT DAY orders, then checks what actually filled.

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Report card

metrics.py and state/: Sharpe, drawdown, volatility, and fill rate, each compared to SPY. Every run is logged as JSON.

Guardrails live in CLAUDE.md and are enforced by code/constitution.py.

Constitution

Hard rules from the repo's CLAUDE.md and README. Checked on every order by constitution.py, which rejects any that breaks them.

Account
Paper only
Alpaca paper endpoint. Anything else is refused in code
Position cap
25%
Of the account, any single holding
Default buy size
10%
Of equity per new position
Daily invest cap
$50k
Buys only. Risk-reducing sells are never capped
Trades / day · week
20 · 50
And never a same-day round trip
Order types
LIMIT · DAY
No market orders
Drawdown brake
15%
Below peak → rotate the book to T-bills
Kill switch
.HALT_TRADING
Halts new orders; the bot never deletes it
Forbidden
Options · Futures · Shorts · Margin · Crypto · Penny / OTC · Leveraged & inverse ETFs
Plus volatility ETFs. No exceptions

Background

AlixPartners LLP

Vice President, AI & Data, New York, NY

Jun 2024 to Present

Sia Partners

Data Science Consultant, New York, NY

Jan 2023 to May 2024

Columbia University

M.S. AI & Robotics, GPA 3.67 / 4.00

Dec 2022

Skills

Agentic AI

AI agents and multi-agent systems, multi-step reasoning and planning, tool/function calling, Model Context Protocol (MCP), agentic RAG workflows, orchestration, prompt and system design, evaluation and guardrails, monitoring, LLMOps

LLM Frameworks & APIs

Anthropic (Claude), OpenAI, LangChain, LlamaIndex, DSPy, CrewAI, Hugging Face, QLoRA fine-tuning

Retrieval

RAG, semantic search, vector databases (Pinecone, FAISS, Azure AI Search, Elasticsearch), embedding models, document indexing

Engineering & Cloud

Python, object-oriented design, REST APIs, PostgreSQL, AWS (Textract, S3), Azure (DevOps, Cosmos, Document Intelligence, AI Search), Snowflake, Prisma ORM, Streamlit

Machine Learning

XGBoost, Scikit-learn, causal inference, time series, predictive modeling

Contact

Want to talk agentic systems, LLM products, or roles where I can build them? Reach out. I read everything.