Taylor Sando
I help engineering teams make AI-assisted systems reliable enough to ship. My work is control-plane reviews, agent orchestration strategy, and architecture guidance for teams that need clearer governance, safer autonomy, and faster technical decisions.
Engineering teams adding AI agents, orchestration, or internal automation to real product and workflow surfaces.
Reviews, advisory, and scoped implementation around reliability, auditability, routing, and system boundaries.
Control-plane tooling across Mesh, Orchestrator, OCC, and Console, product engineering at ReLease/Cios, and earlier HCI research at ACM APGV and IEEE PacificVis.
The public version of the work is narrower than the private stack behind it. This site is meant to answer the practical question first: should we talk about your system, and if so, what kind of engagement fits?
Where I Help
AI agent delivery systems
Move from ad hoc prompts and toolchains to governed workflows with clear boundaries, approvals, and operator visibility.
Control-plane reliability
Untangle routing, auditability, review hooks, knowledge surfaces, and failure paths before complexity hardens into production risk.
Ontology and semantic design
Use control-plane, digital, and payment ontology work when delegation, evidence, or system vocabulary needs to stay coherent across teams and tools.
The research and product threads lower on the page are proof of range. The top of the funnel is simpler: if you are shipping AI-assisted systems and want a clearer control plane, this is the part to pay attention to.
Offers
AI Agent Readiness Review
For teams adopting coding agents or workflow automation but lacking clear boundaries. I map the failure surfaces, approval paths, and missing control-plane pieces before complexity hardens.
Deliverable: written review, risk map, and prioritized next steps in about 2 weeks. Starts at $3,500.
Control-Plane Audit
For teams that already have agents, queues, or orchestration in play and need clearer routing, auditability, and reliability. I focus on the seams where supervision, policy, and operator control start to fail.
Deliverable: architecture readout, gap analysis, and implementation sequence. Scoped to the system.
Embedded Advisory
For founders and engineering leads who want ongoing help shaping architecture, agent policy, and execution decisions while the system is still moving.
Deliverable: recurring decision support, reviews, and implementation guidance over 3 to 6 months. Typical range: $10K to $15K per month.
If you already know the problem and need implementation help, ask about a build sprint after the review. I usually prefer an architecture read before writing the implementation plan.
Writing
Experience
Publications
- Effects of animation, user-controlled interactions, and multiple static views in understanding 3D structures (2009) — ACM APGV — with Melanie Tory and Pourang Irani
- Impact of group size on spatial structure understanding tasks (2011) — IEEE PacificVis — with Melanie Tory and Pourang Irani
Earlier Research
- Does the stress-axis in lake sturgeon undergo habituation? — undergraduate honours research with Gary Anderson, listed in 2009 CV material as a Prairie Universities Biological Symposium (PUBS 2008) presentation
Sandolab — Applied Research Lab
Tracking & Overlay Systems
Work across sando-tracker, learning-overlay, personal-usability, and QEDViz: monitor-focus experiments, overlay surfaces, proof/study tooling, and desktop attention systems.
Control Plane
Current control-plane repos spanning Mesh, Orchestrator, OCC, and Console: file activity tracking, agent routing, policy tooling, and operator surfaces.
Digital Ontology
A living research corpus on delegation, authority, retrieval, trust, and control surfaces across the digital stack, with the thesis kept in sync with Mesh-backed belief maintenance.
WinWar
Strategy-game research around engine semantics, browser projection, replay, inspection, and guided onboarding for complex state.
Hockeypedia
NHL data project focused on trade lineage, player/game ingestion, and analytics surfaces.
QEDViz
Proof visualization and study tooling with shared proof routes, compute/verification services, and Cloud Run deployment paths.
More current work, notes, and experiments at sandolab.xyz
Research Threads
Background
University of Manitoba background in psychology and computer science, with research work in animal behavior and HCI. Published at ACM APGV and IEEE PacificVis before moving into consulting and product engineering.
Current work is split across consulting, control-plane tooling, digital-ontology and payment-ontology notes, community-platform exploration, and public experiments including sandolab.xyz, winwar.sandolab.xyz, and hockeypedia.org.