Solid Base Consult SIA · Riga, Latvia

Roland Abou Younes, founder. Currently Director of Engineering for Core Operations Services and AI Enablement at Groupon. Before that, Group CIO at Sun Finance: 800 employees, eight countries.

Three ways companies put Roland to work.

Make your teams faster with AI. Build AI into what you sell. Or bring him into your own client conversations as the AI expert. All three from one engineering leader who has run the organisation, not only the demo.

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15+ yearssoftware engineering

10+ yearssenior engineering leadership

30 → 100+engineers, one team scaled

$9Mfinancial-infrastructure programme budget

800employee org · Group CIO scope

“What would we hire him for?”

Three offers. Pick where it hurts.

01 · Enable

Make your teams fast with AI

Your people already have AI licences. This turns them into speed: shared setups, working conventions, training that sticks, and the governance that keeps it from being one enthusiast’s side project.

Engineering first, then every function that reads, writes or decides.

For companies where AI spend keeps rising but delivery doesn’t, and what one team learns never reaches the next.

Proof below · the Groupon article and Toptal testimony

02 · Build

Build AI into what you sell

Not tools for your staff. AI in the product itself: features that understand what a customer means, agents that do the work behind a click, and apps that make you findable where your customers already talk to AI.

Smarter behaviour in a fraction of the code, with a person signing off wherever it matters.

For companies where the roadmap has an AI-shaped gap, or a competitor’s product suddenly “just knows”.

Proof below · Eagle Foods and MD Health Pathways

03 · Presales

An AI architect in the room when you sell

You’re pitching a client and AI comes up, as it now does in every deal. Bring Roland into that conversation as your AI capability expert.

He hears the client’s problem and answers on the spot: what AI can genuinely do about it, what it would take to build, and what it would move. Including the honest “that part isn’t worth automating.”

Your pitch closes with a scoped, credible AI solution attached. And if it gets built, you’ve seen who builds it.

For consultancies, agencies and vendors whose clients keep asking about AI, and who’d rather have an expert in the room than a slide about capabilities.

Proof · everything above — that’s who walks into your meeting

“Who says he can?”

Four sources you can check yourself

Groupon

Employer · published the article

MD Health Pathways

Client · healthcare

Eagle Foods

Client · consumer goods

Toptal

Employer · peer & report testimony

Everything below is something you can open: a page published by an employer, or a signed recommendation on a named person’s profile, republished with the originals at nurmind.com/recommendations. Work under NDA is described without naming systems or people.

Proof for 01 · Enable

He did it to an entire engineering organisation

Groupon published this on its own careers site, under Roland’s byline as Engineering Director. Most of that organisation now rarely writes code by hand; teams that estimated in weeks deliver in days.

When Roland joined Groupon in early 2025, the question in the engineering org was “can AI help?”

Twelve months later it had flipped to “why are you still doing this manually?”

Groupon Careers · Leadership Insights · published under his byline

Screenshot of the Groupon Careers article ‘My AI Environment Contributions in Groupon Beyond a Claude Code Setup’ by Roland Abou Younes, Engineering Director — Exhibit 1 grouponcareers.com · Leadership Insights screenshot of the live page, 25 Jul 2026 · Internet Archive capture, 17 May 2026

For clients, the same work runs from a single workshop on Claude Code or Codex up to a standing programme: adoption strategy, procurement and governance, and hands-on coaching for engineers and for every other function.

And it isn’t the first time. At Toptal he built the internal AI tool the whole company ended up using.

“He developed an open-source project, Nur — a knowledge base that later became the foundation for TopAssist, a company-wide tool used at Toptal to interact with LLMs and enterprise documents… those who seek a great manager and hands-on AI expert need look no further.”

Stefano Benatti · AI Innovation Leader, Toptal · LinkedIn recommendation, October 2024

Nur, the open-source project he mentions, is where Roland’s practice took its name.

Read the original recommendation, as it appears on LinkedIn → nurmind.com/recommendations

Proof for 02 · Build

Two shipped products, in the clients’ own words

“What we need doesn’t exist as a product.”

Eagle Foods · consumer goods

A proprietary GenAI marketing capability that had to be invented, proven and shipped, with the question of whether it could be done at all still open at the start.

“What we embarked on was truly breakthrough and Roland eagerly tackled the unknown, as well as many obstacles thrown at us. This project wouldn’t have come to fruition without Roland… Roland’s mindset helped us accomplish the seemingly (at the time) impossible.”

Holly Hirsch · Chief Operating Officer, Eagle Foods at the time of writing · LinkedIn recommendation, April 2025

10× more campaigns run on the same budget. Solid Base Consult’s own figure, not a claim made in Ms Hirsch’s recommendation above.

Read the original recommendation → nurmind.com/recommendations

“We started an AI product and it stalled.”

MD Health Pathways · healthcare

A previous team left a half-built clinical AI platform. Nur AI, the practice Roland runs through Solid Base Consult, took it over: rebuilt the AI so results were accurate and reliable, added the reporting management needed to see what the system was doing, secured it, and tuned it far past the original workload plan.

“They inherited a hostage AI project, stabilized it, and rebuilt the core AI functionality to perform as we originally envisioned, all under tight deadlines while our business couldn’t afford delays… They safeguarded our investment when it was genuinely at risk, and then built on it.”

Dirk Perritt, M.D. · CEO, MD Health Pathways · LinkedIn recommendation, February 2026

8× the service capacity they can handle since the enablement. Solid Base Consult’s own figure, not a claim made in Dr Perritt’s recommendation above.

Read the original recommendation → nurmind.com/recommendations

How 02 is kept honest

Nothing gets built on a hunch

Before anything is built, you agree what it should move and write down where that number stands today. At the end you take the same measurement, the same way, and decide whether it earned its place.

Deployments are reversible, your data stays inside your own infrastructure, and a person signs off before anything touches a real decision. Your position under the EU AI Act is read as part of the work: which risk category your systems likely fall into, what documentation is missing, and what to review with your lawyers.

“Are we even a fit?”

Who this is for, and who it isn’t

A fit if

Your teams have AI licences and not much to show for them.
Your product roadmap has an AI-shaped gap.
An AI project stalled, or you inherited one that half-works.
You know AI matters but not where it pays.
Your data is sensitive or regulated and cannot leave your infrastructure.

Not a fit if

You want a chatbot bolted onto a website as cheaply as possible.
You want someone to resell you a platform licence.
You want a strategy deck rather than working software.
You need a large delivery team on site next month.
You want a system making consequential decisions with nobody in the loop.

Engagements run on time and materials against a scope agreed up front. You buy the work actually done, and you can stop at any stage boundary.

Talk to Roland directly

Write a few lines about where you are, or pick a slot in the calendar. You will be talking to the person who does the work, not a sales team. If it is not a fit, you will hear that too.

Book a call

Roland Abou Younes · founder, Solid Base Consult SIA
roland@abouyounes.com · +371 22442080
cal.com/roland · nurmind.com · linkedin.com/in/rolanday