/about
Mak Ziga.Applied AI Engineer.
I've been doing AI since ChatGPT launched in November 2022. Within hours I was experimenting; within months I was building production prompt systems for companies. Now I'm the Founding Head of Applied AI at SynthWeave, where I've shipped 30+ production tools and the prompting architecture behind a multi-agent platform.
What I'm good at is finding solutions nobody else thought of, and when something isn't working, figuring out why. I've built systems where the creative approach itself was the breakthrough, and I've saved clients from scrapping projects by finding the real root cause instead of just tweaking instructions.
Based in Sarajevo, building globally.
- →Anthropic Red Team alumni (Autumn 2024 + Spring 2025)
- →Top Rated Plus on Upwork, held the rank for one year before stepping back
- →Founding Head of Applied AI at SynthWeave
Selected experience
Where the work has happened, in order.
SynthWeave
NowFounding Head of Applied AI
May 2025 to Present
- Building the platform behind effective human-AI collaborative teams. Working directly with the CEO.
- Shipped 30+ production tools and the prompting architecture behind the multi-agent platform.
- Designing and shipping full AI solutions for enterprise clients, from scoping to production.
Anthropic
AI Safety Red Team Researcher
Sep 2024 to Jul 2025
- Tested unreleased Claude models in both the Autumn 2024 and Spring 2025 cohorts.
- Tried to break Constitutional Classifiers and other safety mitigations built for ASL-3 deployment.
- Focused on universal bypass vectors across CBRN domains. Work fed into Anthropic's broader pre-release stress testing.
Upwork
Applied AI Engineer
Nov 2023 to Nov 2025
- Top Rated Plus for one full year before stepping back from Upwork to focus on SynthWeave.
- Worked with founders and small technical teams who'd hit a wall with their AI features. Mostly fixing what didn't work, then shipping what was missing.
- Highlights: novel/short-story generation app with cost-controlled branching, health coaching chatbot at 65% lower API cost, pipelines producing 20,000+ unique outputs at sub-2% repetition.
Vert Ventures
Prompt Engineer
Jun 2024 to Dec 2024
- Production prompts behind a portfolio of high-growth bootstrapped apps with $25M+ combined ARR.
- Apps include Astra (life advice) and Haven Bible Chat. Both tuned for quality, speed, cost, and scale.
CustomGPT.ai
Prompt Engineer
Apr 2024 to Dec 2024
- Built the platform's hallucination detection system on GPT-4o mini after earlier GPT-3.5 and Llama attempts had failed.
- Cut free trial chatbot token usage by 50% during the GPT-4o migration without losing response quality.
- Created six persona templates from a personality rubric system I built for the platform.
Width.ai
Prompt Engineer
Jan 2024 to Sep 2024
- Client work in healthcare, education, finance, and consumer apps.
- Multi-step prompt system for medical billing extraction with insurance payment calculations. Sub-second prompt-injection-hardened flow for live video identity checks.
- Saved a RAG-based FAFSA chatbot by diagnosing that the issue was bad source data, not bad prompts.
Anablock
AI Engineer
Jan 2024 to Aug 2024
- Prompt work for both LLMs and image generation systems.
- RAG prompts that pulled retrieved context without hallucinating, and a photoreal headshot generator with consistent results across subjects.
- Automated regression testing across hundreds of test cases per prompt set.
Pump.co
Prompt Engineer
Sep 2023 to Dec 2023
- Multi-stage prompts for PumpGPT, an AI assistant for AWS cost reduction. Recommendations often cut user spend 40 to 60%.
- Validation layers prevented suggestions that would break production infrastructure.
Client feedback
“Mak is absolutely incredible, one of the top talents on Upwork. Very smart and quick at understanding what needs to get done. I'd highly recommend anyone who has the chance to work with him to take it. An absolute gem.”
“You cannot go wrong with hiring him. Not only does he create fantastic prompts, he also does a rigorous examination of the LLMs to figure out which one is best for you. Would absolutely hire him again.”
Earlier
Started at FlowGPT in early 2023.
Got into AI by winning FlowGPT's Hackathon Season 1, which led to my first role there as Prompt Engineer. Wrote their internal prompt engineering guides, set up their first prompt testing methodology, and managed a 20,000-member community before the work pulled me toward what I'm doing now.
Outside work
Things I do when I'm not at the keyboard.
Follow F1 closely. Ride mountain bikes. Hike. Produce my own music as a hobby.