Modernize your systems without the enterprise consultancy bill.

Ship AI integrations you can actually audit.

Ontologi is the independent practice of Madeleine Muscari — principal platform engineer with twenty years across API infrastructure, platform engineering, and AI security at Twilio, Weights & Biases, Material Security, and two founding-engineer roles. Two U.S. patents on API gateway architecture. Based in Berkeley, California. Available for right-sized modernization projects, AI integrations, architecture reviews, and scoped engineering engagements — delivered at a fraction of what an enterprise consultancy would quote for the same work.

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Who Ontologi serves

Ontologi works with small- and mid-sized businesses and technology startups that need a deep staffing bench without the commitment of a full-time hire. Engagements are scoped to the shape of the work and sized so one senior engineer can deliver end-to-end — without the overhead of an agency or the tail risk of a cheap freelancer.

Engagements

Ontologi takes project-based engineering engagements: scoped work delivered on a cadence that matches the business's need, from a two-week audit to a multi-month modernization project. Typical engagements include data platform audits and rebuilds, operational dashboards and intelligence tooling, AI integrations and agentic automation built with production-grade discipline, architecture reviews of existing systems or vendor proposals, and scoped senior engineering support for teams that need depth without the overhead of a permanent hire. Engagements often extend or evolve as the work reveals what is actually needed. All engagements are scoped through a first conversation.

Most Ontologi engagements fall between four and five figures — an order of magnitude less than an enterprise consultancy would quote for comparable scope. The difference is structural. There is no agency overhead, no billable pyramid, and no junior staff learning on your project. One senior engineer runs the discovery, the architecture, the build, and the handoff, and she uses modern AI coding tools effectively enough that the billed hours on a given engagement are a fraction of what a traditional firm would require. Ontologi is not cheap. Ontologi is lean.

What Ontologi delivers

Systems that match your reality. Data platforms, dashboards, and operational tooling that reconcile to your financials, your inventory, your schedule, and the way your business actually runs — not to a vendor's demo data.
AI integrations you can audit. Agentic automation and AI-assisted tooling built with the boundaries, review steps, and audit trails that production systems need, so the model's decisions are legible to the humans responsible for them.
Architecture you can defend. Written reviews of proposed systems or vendor pitches, in language you can bring to a board or a budget conversation, identifying the risks nobody else is naming and the dependencies nobody else is pricing.
Protection from silent drift. Guardrails against the failure mode where operational data and financial reality slowly diverge until nobody can tell which number to trust — and the tooling to catch it early when it starts.
Knowledge transfer at the end of every engagement. When Ontologi leaves, your team understands what was built, how it works, and how to maintain it. No black boxes, no consultant lock-in.

Is Ontologi right for you?

You run a business that has outgrown its systems. Your current software was built over years, maybe by multiple people, maybe by nobody who is still around. You know you need to modernize, integrate AI tooling, build operational dashboards, or all three — but every vendor quote looks either terrifyingly expensive or suspiciously cheap, and you cannot tell which is which. Ontologi takes engagements where the first deliverable is clarity: a read of what you have, what the risks are, and what a right-sized next step looks like — in language you can act on, not in language that requires you to already know the answer.

You want to ship AI integrations without the tail risk. You have seen what AI coding tools can do and you want that leverage in your business — but you have also seen what happens when AI-generated code hits production without a senior engineer reviewing it, and you are not willing to bet your operation on a prototype that works on the happy path. Ontologi builds AI integrations with the same discipline applied to any production system: scoped, reviewed, grounded in real data, with the failure modes mapped before launch.

You need senior engineering support without onboarding a full-time hire. Your team has a gap — platform, infrastructure, security, data, ML, or architecture judgment — and you need someone who can ramp fast, fill the need, and deliver scoped work without the overhead of a permanent hire. Ontologi ramps on new codebases quickly via AI-assisted discovery and takes engagements sized to the actual shape of the work.

You are making an architecture decision you cannot afford to get wrong. You are evaluating a vendor pitch, a modernization plan, or a major infrastructure change, and you want a senior engineer who does not sell what you are buying to read the proposal and tell you what it actually means. Ontologi takes standalone architecture reviews and writes them in language a non-technical stakeholder can use in a budget conversation.

You built with AI and need someone to check the work. You used Cursor, Copilot, Claude Code, or another AI-assisted coding tool to build your product. It is running — maybe making money — but no senior engineer has reviewed what shipped. You want someone who can find what is missing, tell you what matters, and help you structure workflows that make AI-assisted development auditable rather than unpredictable.

Probably not the right fit if…

You need a marketing website or graphic design. Ontologi is engineering, not design. If your primary need is branding, visual design, or marketing collateral, that is a different shop.

You need a dedicated team of ten. Ontologi is a small, senior practice — not a staffing firm. If your project genuinely needs a full team for six months, Ontologi is not structured for that scale. If your project could be delivered by one senior engineer doing the work of a small team, that is exactly what Ontologi is built for.

About

Madeleine Muscari is a principal platform engineer with twenty years across API infrastructure, platform systems, and AI security. Her career includes seven years as Principal Engineer at Twilio, where she was responsible for the REST API gateway at 99.999% uptime and led the design of its next-generation architecture, and subsequent roles as Staff Software Engineer at Weights & Biases, Senior Staff Software Engineer at Material Security, and founding engineer at DeepKeel and Foam. She holds two U.S. patents on API gateway throttling and edge communication architecture. She founded Ontologi LLC in 2025 as an independent practice for senior platform, infrastructure, and AI security work.

Alongside the consultancy, she maintains an independent research practice focused on the exploration of algebraic representations in transformer residual activations. Her graduate research at Rutgers covered distributed systems at DiscoLab (the SBONE social-backbone project) under Liviu Iftode, and single-author work on constrained non-negative matrix factorization for network role discovery in social graphs, supervised by Tina Eliassi-Rad and published as the GLRD paper — the latter supported by IARPA via AFRL Contract No. FA8650-10-C-7061.

She also builds independent software: programs for AI inference, agent tool calling, and personal data management. These are active projects maintained alongside client work; they inform the consultancy's judgment on how production AI systems are actually constructed and where their boundaries should sit.

Her creative practice is a computational continuation of a three-generation artistic lineage. Her grandfather, Alfred F. Muscari, was a painter, amateur luthier, industrial designer, and Director of Public Relations Art & Design for New York Telephone and the Bell System; her father, Matthew Muscari, was a Pratt-trained printmaker, photographer, and educator active in the late-1970s New York downtown art scene. Their archives form the source material for her computational sculpture practice, in which family artworks are processed through generative models and rendered as 3D-printed forms. The practice is understood as continuous with the engineering and research work rather than separate from it: the same tools, the same habits of mind, applied to a different surface.

Experience

Ontologi, LLC · Founder / Principal Engineer · 2025–present Independent platform engineering practice. Modernization projects, AI integrations, architecture reviews, and scoped engineering engagements.
Foam · Founding Engineer · 2025 Authentication, authorization, observability, and database architecture for an agentic code repair product.
DeepKeel · Founding Engineer · 2024 LLM-based agent for cloud SaaS security. Designed a code inspection framework for validation and audit of LLM-generated code.
Material Security · Senior Staff Software Engineer · 2023–2024 Led the Platform team. Built observability for a new product launch. Established a finops team that cut cloud spend 30% in three months.
Weights & Biases · Staff Software Engineer · 2022–2023 Operated the public GraphQL API and backend storage. Built task scheduling for packaged deployments.
Twilio · Principal Software Engineer / Technical Lead · 2015–2022 Responsible for the REST API gateway at 99.999% uptime. Designed and implemented global API ingress architecture. Led design of the next-generation API gateway. Designed a write-path queueing system achieving 99.999% success rate. Data processing systems for GDPR & HIPAA compliance.
Gracenote · Senior Software Engineer · 2015 Data warehousing and analytics system for media metadata using Apache Spark.
LiveNation Entertainment · Senior Software Engineer · 2014–2015 Social graph-based concert recommendation system using Akka, Play Framework, and Apache Cassandra.
nRelate · Algorithm Developer · 2012–2014 Data compression system reducing MongoDB write operations by 98%. Recommendation algorithm leveraging clickstream clustering that doubled clickthrough rates for ask.com.
Rutgers University · Graduate Assistant · 2009–2012 Taught database systems. Research at DiscoLab (SBONE, distributed systems) under Liviu Iftode. Single-author work on network role discovery in social graphs (GLRD paper) supervised by Tina Eliassi-Rad.
AT&T Services · Associate IT Analyst · 2007–2009 Enhanced interactivity in cloud hosting ordering and provisioning systems via AJAX and SOAP.

Patents

US11601519B2: Edge Communication Locations Global routing of API requests to reduce latency and increase availability across multiple regions.
US20220405119A1: API Request Throttling Rate and concurrency limits on API requests in a multi-tenant environment.

Education & Research

Rutgers University, Graduate Studies · 2009–2012 Distributed systems at DiscoLab (SBONE). Single-author work on constrained non-negative matrix factorization for network role discovery in social graphs (GLRD paper), under IARPA via AFRL Contract No. FA8650-10-C-7061.
Rutgers University, School of Engineering · 2003–2007 · B.E. Electrical & Computer Engineering, Computer Science. Cum Laude, divisional honors in CS.

Python, Java, Scala, Golang. AWS, GCP, Azure. Kubernetes, Terraform, Docker. MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Cassandra. DSPy, PyTorch, OpenAPI, GraphQL.

Heritage

The Ontologi archive spans three generations of American visual art, design, and invention, rooted in an Italian lineage originally from Scigliano in Calabria — distinguished in magistracy and arms, aggregated to the patriciate of Salerno, entered into the Order of Malta in 1398, and inscribed in the Registro delle Piazze Chiuse del Regno di Napoli.

Four Muscari brothers — Giuseppe, Gregorio, Carlo, and Mercurio — served the Parthenopean Republic of 1799. Carlo sat on the Republic's Finance Commission and captained the 2nd Company of the Republican National Guard; Gregorio commanded the Legione Calabra, the volunteer corps from their home region. After the Republic fell, three of the brothers took exile in France. Carlo was executed in Naples on 6 March 1800, among the martyrs of the Bourbon restoration. Gregorio is Madeleine Muscari's great-great-grandfather.

The Parthenopean Republic's tricolor — blue, yellow, and red — carried through the site's design is inherited rather than chosen: a marker of bold independence and strong ethical principle that names the register the practice tries to work in.

Alfred F. Muscari and Matthew Muscari are presented below. Their archives are the source material from which the practice continues.

Alfred F. Muscari (1903–1993)

Painter, amateur luthier, industrial designer. Alfred spent his career as Director of Public Relations Art & Design for New York Telephone and the Bell System, where he co-designed the iconic American telephone booth (US Design Patent 197,963, 1964), created the illuminated dial for the Princess phone, and contributed to the AT&T Pavilion at the 1964 New York World's Fair. He was a member of the Salmagundi Club, painting landscapes in oil and watercolor—lighthouses, winter streams, the eastern seaboard. He also designed a Tudor Revival home in Teaneck, New Jersey, which became an architectural model for the surrounding neighborhood. He was a Life Member of the Telephone Pioneers of America.

Matthew Muscari (1946–2019)

Printmaker, photographer, educator. Matthew earned his BFA from the New York Institute of Technology (1970) and his MFA from Pratt Institute (1973), specializing in intaglio, traditional lithography on stone and metal plates, and silkscreen. He was a resident of the Westbeth Artists Community in Manhattan and part of the Mudd Club scene in late-1970s and early-1980s New York. His prints were exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum, shown in multiple solo exhibitions at Ward-Nasse Gallery, and purchased by the United States Information Agency for international exhibition. He taught art across New Jersey for over two decades—in Paterson Public Schools, the Montclair State University Gifted and Talented Program, and the Teaneck Board of Education—working in printmaking, painting, drawing, photography, cartooning, and Chinese brush painting.