Leadership · Cloud Infrastructure · AI Forward
Focused technical consulting for teams building serious infrastructure. Cloud architecture, fractional CTO leadership, and AI/ML systems — from someone who's built them at Block, Google, and beyond.
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Engagements are scoped to what you actually need — from a few hours of architecture review to embedded technical leadership over months.
Design, review, and migration of production cloud systems. Deep expertise in AWS and GCP — compute, storage, networking, and cost optimization. From greenfield builds to untangling what already exists.
For startups and growing teams that need senior technical direction without a full-time hire. Architecture decisions, hiring strategy, team structure, reliability practices, and the bridge between engineering and product/business.
The infrastructure underneath AI workloads — storage for training data at scale, compute orchestration, model serving, and the pipelines that feed them. Not the models themselves, but everything that makes them possible in production.
General-purpose engineering work for hard problems — distributed systems, API design, performance optimization, and building things from scratch. Rust, Java, Python, TypeScript. If it needs to be fast, correct, and maintainable, that's the work I like.
The Name
The generative pre-trained transformer (GPT) is changing our world, and our work. In the transformer attention mechanism, Q, K, and V are the three projections that let a model see what matters. Good consulting works the same way.
You come with the question — the problem, the architecture decision, the system that needs to exist. We start by understanding exactly what you're looking for.
Experience is the key space. Years building infrastructure at Google, Block, and startups — cloud storage, distributed systems, Lightning, reliability engineering — matched to your query.
The output is value: a production architecture, a clear technical decision, a team unblocked, a system that actually ships. Attention is just the mechanism — value is the point.
About
QKV Consulting is Dominic Zippilli — an engineer, founder, and PM with deep experience shipping production systems at scale.
Co-founded Fugue (raised $30M+), built the Lightning payment infrastructure behind Cash App and Square, and worked at Google Cloud on storage systems that power some of the largest AI training workloads in the world. The work has always been about going from nothing to something real.
Advised Google Cloud's largest accounts — including OpenAI, Twitter, Citadel, and Two Sigma — on storage architecture. Led the Lightning team at Block to 3.5 nines of reliability across 1.5M transactions per month. Serious infrastructure, serious stakes.
I don't do 80-page slide decks. I do clear architecture decisions, written rationale, and working prototypes. Our work should leave you with something you can actually build on — not a binder that sits on a shelf.
If you need three weeks of embedded work, great. If you need four hours of architecture review, that's great too. I'll tell you what I think you actually need, and I won't pad it.
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Whether it's a quick architecture question or an ongoing engagement, we're happy to talk.