Senior data & AI leadership for startups — from strategy to shipped product.
Citridge gives founders the senior data and AI leverage they can't yet hire full-time — setting the strategy, building the systems, and shipping the product. Modern solutions, startup speed.
working as one.
Most startups have data and AI ambitions — and no one senior to own them.
You've got users, data, and a list of AI features you want to ship. What you don't have is a senior data and AI hand to decide what matters, build it properly, and get it into production — so dashboards go stale, AI stays stuck in demos, and the roadmap slips.
Citridge is that hand: strategy, engineering, and judgment in one engagement — the senior hire you're not ready to make full-time.
Strategy first.
Built to ship.
Data & Analytics
Well-defined metrics, reliable pipelines, and reporting your team trusts enough to act on. Fewer numbers, defined precisely, meaning the same thing to everyone.
Applied AI & Automation
LLM-powered features, document and data extraction, and workflow automation — scoped to where it genuinely earns its place and engineered around its limits so it actually reaches production.
Product & Data Strategy
What to build and why: roadmap and metric definitions, build-vs-buy calls, and the architecture that lets a product scale without painting you into a corner.
Senior Leadership, Hands-On
Not a deck-and-handoff shop. Strategy, build, and verification come from one engagement — the judgment of a senior hire, doing the work, never tossed between teams.
Two ways in.
Most engagements start as a focused project and grow into something ongoing.
Your data & AI lead, part-time
Ongoing senior leadership on a monthly retainer. I plug into your team, own the data and AI roadmap, and ship alongside you — the senior hire you're not ready to make full-time, available when you need the leverage.
A defined outcome, fixed scope
A pipeline stood up, an AI feature shipped, a reporting layer your team can finally trust. A clean, low-risk way to start — and to see how we work together before anything bigger.
From raw data to a product people actually use.
Dashboards, pipelines, and AI-powered tools — built clean, scaled sensibly, and designed so the people who depend on them trust what they see.
Illustrative — not a real client dashboard.
The simplest solution that fully solves the problem.
One conviction guides the work: the simplest solution that fully solves the problem is almost always the right one.
Clarity before code.
Assumptions surfaced, tradeoffs named, success defined — before anything gets built.
Surgical, not sprawling.
Only what needs changing gets changed. No speculative complexity, no scope creep dressed up as thoroughness.
Goal-driven and verifiable.
Concrete success criteria, so progress is measurable and the work is checked against the goal, not a vibe.
Senior judgment, hands-on delivery.
Not a deck-and-handoff shop. Advice, build, and verification come from one engagement — never tossed between teams.
A good fit if you…
- Have real users and data, but no senior data or AI owner yet
- Want to ship AI into production — not run another experiment that stalls at the demo
- Are scaling a product and need senior data/AI leverage without a full-time exec hire
- Need strategy and delivery from one person — not a strategist who can't build and a builder without judgment
- Want to move at startup speed without accumulating a mess you'll pay for later
Senior judgment, with the willingness to build.
Citridge is led by Nick Bird, bringing together three disciplines that usually sit in separate hires — data, applied AI, and strategy — with hands-on experience building data-rich products and the systems behind them.
Senior judgment paired with the willingness to do the hands-on building most consultancies hand off — so founders get strategy and a shipped result from the same person.
Let's build something that moves the business.
Tell me what you're working on. If it's a fit, you'll get a straight answer fast.
The form comes straight to my inbox, and I usually reply within one business day.