TT Tunga Tessema
Forward deployed AI engineering for US companies

We put AI into your operations — and keep it working.

We embed with your team, map how the work really gets done, and ship the automation with the highest return into production. Not a demo. A system your people use every day.

Book a discovery call See how an engagement works
Every step of your process lands in one of four buckets
01 Delete Work nobody needs
02 Deterministic code Rules that never change
03 AI agent Judgment at scale
04 Human approval Where the stakes are high
Only the right steps get AI. The rest get simpler.
The problem

Most AI projects stall somewhere between the demo and production.

The process on paper isn't the real process

The documented workflow skips the workarounds, exceptions and tribal knowledge your team relies on. Automate the paper version and it breaks on day one.

Demos don't handle edge cases

A prototype works on the happy path. Production means messy data, odd inputs, system outages and the decisions that need a person to sign off.

Nobody owns it after launch

AI systems drift. New exceptions appear and models change. Without someone watching quality and cost, the value quietly erodes.

The method

Map the real work. Then sort every step.

We interview the people who do the work and mine the data in the systems you already use, so the map includes the exceptions people forget to mention. Then each step goes into one of four buckets.

Delete

Steps that exist out of habit: duplicate entry, reports nobody reads, approvals that never get rejected. The cheapest automation is removing the work.

Deterministic code

Steps that follow fixed rules: syncing systems, validating fields, routing by known criteria. Plain code is faster, cheaper and more reliable than AI here.

AI agent

Steps that need reading, judgment or language: triaging requests, extracting data from documents, drafting responses. Built with evaluations so quality is measured, not assumed.

Human approval

Steps where a wrong call is costly. The system prepares everything and a person approves with one click, so your team keeps control without doing the busywork.

How an engagement works

Start small. Prove the return. Then expand.

Each phase is a separate, fixed-scope decision. You never commit to more than the next step.

PHASE 1 4 weeks

Discovery

Interviews, system data analysis and the four-bucket map of your process. You get a ranked list of opportunities with estimated return, feasibility and effort, plus baseline metrics to measure against.

Starting from $12,000
PHASE 2 4–8 weeks

Build & deploy

The single highest-return opportunity that can realistically ship, taken all the way to production with your real users, real data and the integrations it needs. Priced from what discovery found, so there are no surprises.

Starting from $25,000
PHASE 3 Monthly

Run & improve

Monitoring, new edge cases, model updates and cost control, with a monthly report on the return delivered. When you're ready, the next opportunity on the roadmap.

Starting from $4,000 / month
Choosing what to build

The highest return that can actually ship.

Discovery usually surfaces many opportunities. The biggest one isn't always the right first move, because a stalled project helps no one. Every opportunity is scored on four things.

Value Volume × time per task × cost, plus the cost of errors today.
Feasibility Data access, available integrations and how messy the exceptions are.
Risk What happens when the system gets it wrong, and how it's caught.
Visibility Whether a win here is one your leadership will notice and care about.
Selected work

Systems I've taken to production

Across healthcare, fintech, logistics and research, the pattern is the same: messy real-world data and processes, turned into software people rely on.

Healthcare · US multi-specialty clinics

A hybrid EHR, from credentialing to billing

A multi-location clinic group needed one system for telehealth, in-house and in-person care, plus a separate product for QME evaluations.

  • Led product for the EHR and the QME platform
  • Covered every clinical workflow, from credentialing to billing
  • Managed all integrations through to production access
Delivered in 4 months, now going live
Research · Carnegie Mellon University Africa

An AI assistant for handwritten consent forms

Officers were manually processing handwritten consent forms in Amharic and English, slowing down data ingestion.

  • Led a cross-functional team from design to deployment
  • Built handwritten OCR and YOLO region-detection models
  • Ran the data labeling process for training data
Faster ingestion and a 300k+ line open dataset published at ICDAR 2026
Fintech · ArifPay

A data warehouse for 40M+ transactions

A payments company needed reliable analytics on a high volume of transaction data.

  • Designed a dimensional data warehouse
  • Built SQL and PySpark ETL pipelines
  • Sped up dashboards with optimized queries and materialized views
40M+ transactions processed for business reporting
Logistics · OX Delivers

Operational insight from truck GPS and order data

A delivery company needed to turn high-volume GPS and order data into insights its teams could act on.

  • Architected a scalable data warehouse
  • Built dimensional models and ETL pipelines with data-quality checks
  • Delivered Metabase dashboards for executives and operations
Executive and operations teams on one trusted data source
Development finance · African Development Bank

Multilingual AI for ranking CVs

Recruiters needed to screen CVs written in both English and French against job descriptions.

  • Trained separate English and French NER models
  • Extracted skills, location and education from CVs
  • Labeled training data efficiently with Doccano
An AI tool that ranks CVs in two languages
Fintech · Akiba Digital

Risk and affordability models, served by API

A lending platform needed to assess borrower risk, liquidity and affordability inside its clients’ products.

  • Developed and validated financial risk models
  • Deployed the models as a RESTful API with FastAPI
  • Built a service to extract data from 5 major South African banks
Faster, more efficient loan approvals
Working together

Built for US teams, delivered remotely.

A US company

You contract with our US limited liability company. US contracts, invoices in USD, standard payment methods.

Your hours

5 hours of guaranteed overlap with US Eastern time every working day, plus async updates you can read in five minutes.

You own the work

Code, prompts, evaluations and documentation are yours, in your repositories and your cloud accounts.

Security first

Least-privilege access, your data stays in your systems, and we're happy to work through your security review and sign an NDA.

Portrait of Tunga Tessema
About

Hi, I'm Tunga Tessema.

I've spent my career turning messy, real-world processes into software that runs in production. Today I'm Head of Product at a US multi-specialty, multi-location healthcare company, where I lead all technology projects and manage two products: a QME platform and a hybrid EHR that supports telehealth, in-house and in-person visits, and every clinical workflow from credentialing to billing. We delivered the EHR in four months and are now taking its integrations live.

Before that, I led the deployment of an AI assistant that processes handwritten consent forms at Carnegie Mellon University Africa, built data warehouses and pipelines processing 40+ million transactions, and shipped NLP models for the African Development Bank. I started out as a founder, building and launching web and mobile products, and I hold an MS in Information Technology from Carnegie Mellon.

I lead every engagement personally and bring in engineers from our team for integrations, data and front-end work as the project needs. You get one accountable lead with the capacity of a team.

4 months Full clinical EHR, from kickoff to delivery
40M+ Transactions processed by pipelines I built
ICDAR 2026 Published research in OCR and document AI
3 languages English, French and Amharic
Head of Product, US multi-specialty healthcare company Present
Research Associate, Upanzi Network, Carnegie Mellon University Africa 2024–2026
Analytics Engineer, OX Delivers 2025–2026
Big Data Engineer, ArifPay 2024
Data Scientist, African Development Bank 2023
AI & Strategy Consultant, Bosch (grow platform) and Innovation Works 2024
Founder & Head of Engineering, Highlight Software Design 2021–2022
MS in Information Technology, Carnegie Mellon University · BSc in Software Engineering, Addis Ababa University Education
View my LinkedIn profile →

Questions

What if discovery doesn't find anything worth building?

Then you'll know that before spending on a build, and you still keep the process map, the steps worth deleting and the baseline metrics. Discovery is useful on its own.

Why not automate everything at once?

One use case in production with measured results beats five half-finished pilots. It proves the return, builds trust with your team and makes the next project faster.

What do you need from my team?

A decision-maker who owns the outcome, a few hours with the people who do the work, and access to the relevant systems. These are agreed up front with dates, so timelines stay realistic.

Who will work on my project?

I lead every engagement from discovery to launch, and our team adds engineers with the right skills for your systems. Tools and models are chosen to fit your stack and constraints, not habit.

Have a process that eats your team's week?

Book a 30-minute call. We'll talk through the workflow and whether discovery makes sense. No pitch deck.

Book a discovery call or email highlight.software.design@gmail.com