Machine record | Tristin Esfandiari

Document manifest

Canonical Markdown endpoints

01Agent index/llms.mdCanonical routes and recommended reading order.
02Markdown résumé/resume.mdThe candidate-facing résumé, reproduced verbatim.
03PDF résumé/tristin-esfandiari-resume.pdfThe same résumé as a downloadable, print-ready PDF.
04Career record/portfolio.mdA fuller chronology with role and project context.

Profile

Identity and working thesis

I get called in when a company has more information than it can use.

Name: Tristin Esfandiari
Base: San Diego, California
Current role: Independent Consultant, AI and Operations
Education: MBA expected June 2027

Fifteen years building operating systems, the last three inside AI products. I run workflow discovery, choose the use case, build the thing, and stay until the team runs it without me. Most recently a regulated clinical review that went from 6 hours to 20 minutes, with the clinician still making the call.

Professional experience

Reverse chronological

January 2026 to Present

Independent Consultant, AI and Operations

San Diego, CA

Companies bring me in when they have more information than they can use and no clear path from AI interest to daily work. I map the work, find the constraint, and build only what the team can adopt.

Ran AI adoption at a 40-person M&A advisory firm. Scoped which workflows were worth automating (valuations, market comps, CIM drafting) and which were not. Opened with a full-firm workshop and handed over a biweekly series the firm now runs without me.
Built a document-redaction layer so associates could push confidential deal materials through commercial LLMs. Confidentiality is the specific reason most advisory firms stall on AI. This removed it.
Rebuilt a rehabilitation center's admissions review to estimate reimbursement, cost, and case margin from intake records. Cut staff time roughly 10x and removed the dependence on payer phone calls. Still running without me.
Repackaged an event-content studio's offerings and rebuilt its sales pipeline: contracts, pricing tiers, proposal templates, Gusto onboarding, payroll, banking, and Stripe billing. $50K+ in contracts within 30 days.
Led a build-versus-buy review for a staffing client and recommended an existing product at a fraction of the projected build cost.

September 2023 to Present

Teaching Assistant and Instructional AI Product Manager, TritonGPT · Rady School of Management, UC San Diego

San Diego, CA

Lead teaching assistant across eight consecutive quarters. Deliver full lectures in Marketing, Business Ethics, and Negotiations.
Turn faculty questions into requirements, prompts, grading rules, and governance needs for course-based AI assistants.
Built an AI grading workflow for negotiation simulations with a fixed scoring rubric and structured feedback. Moved the assistant into TritonGPT production for classroom testing with UC San Diego's AI service owner.
Compared Claude Sonnet 3.5, Llama 4B, and GPT-4o for grading variance and feedback quality to guide model choice and human-review rules.
Designed evals and quantitative metrics for a subjective assessment by separating generation from evaluation instead of letting the model grade itself.

December 2025 to June 2026

Founder and CTO, Mauralink

San Diego, CA

Built a manager and employee compatibility assessment from organizational-psychology research to a live platform in six months.

Onboarded the first enterprise client, 5,000+ employees, while the product was still being built.
Ran customer discovery alongside development instead of ahead of it. Client feedback changed requirements and release priorities.
Built the system: 8 behavioral scales, 48 items, an LLM narrative engine across 18 content types and 5 pipeline paths, 271 tests, and a GraphRAG knowledge graph over 367 papers.

February 2024 to January 2026

Founder and CEO, UniWise

San Diego, CA

Started UniWise to make long clinical records faster to review without taking the clinician out of the decision. Learned to code within six months so I could specify and evaluate the system directly.

Shipped a retrieval pipeline turning 300 to 500 page donor records into cited, severity-ranked case reviews a clinician could approve in 20 minutes, down from 6 hours, with the final call human by design.
Built HIPAA and FDA requirements into the architecture from the first commit: PHI controls, human-review gates, audit citations. Negotiated the BAAs directly with covered entities.
Interviewed roughly 1,000 candidates to hire a 12-person team of CS PhDs and graduate students. Designed the interview process and evaluation criteria, then rebuilt roles around each person's actual strength.
Raised $450K across angel and friends-and-family rounds out of 100+ investor conversations. Structured the SAFEs and term sheets, wrote the ESOP, restructured the cap table.
Signed two enterprise pilot customers and a $75K pilot partnership agreement with a regional organ and tissue bank.
Closed a $46K services contract and launched the client's brand, patient acquisition, EMR selection, and answering service in 30 days. The client converted to an equity-holding medical advisor.
Converted the company to a public benefit corporation. Drafted the charter and proxy cards and secured a two-thirds shareholder vote.
Won first place at UCSD Basement Demo Day and third at Rady StartR two weeks later. 50+ inbound VC contacts.
Stack: Google ADK, Anthropic SDK, AWS Bedrock, AWS Amplify, MongoDB Atlas, Auth0.
Wound the company down at insolvency and communicated it directly to investors, employees, and customers.

May 2022 to June 2023

Marketing Manager, BAND (Naver Corp.)

Los Angeles, CA

Took a product built in Korea and opened a new U.S. market for it in schools.

Chose the segments, positioning, and campaign plan for the U.S. education vertical across high school band, dance, cheer, and athletics.
Led a team of 6 and tested content, paid media, community programs, and customer stories.
Launched a user-generated content campaign that drew 10,000+ participants.
Produced five on-location commercial productions with customer schools end to end: contracts, storyboards, crew, direction, distribution.
Public face of the U.S. office. Delivered conference keynotes to audiences of 200 to 1,500.

June 2019 to March 2022

VP of Operations, Power Washing Pros and OPS Inc

Los Angeles, CA

Joined a four-person field company and built the operating systems it needed to become a 50-person, $8M business.

Built the operating infrastructure from nothing across three businesses: lead intake, quoting, dispatch, workforce, fleet tracking, inventory, billing, licensing, insurance, and SOPs.
Those systems carried the business from 4 employees to 50 and $8M in annual revenue. The SOPs outlived my tenure.
Selected and ran the stack: Salesforce, FieldPulse, QuickBooks, and a custom employee and inventory application.
Opened a government contracting channel: federal and state vendor registrations, DUNS number, and competitive public bids won.
Replaced on-site survey visits with aerial and satellite imagery estimating, compressing quote turnaround.
Launched the portfolio's third business, virtual staffing, end to end: operating model, contracts, and full technology stack.

Earlier career context

2011 to 2019

Founder, DAM Inc. · Marketing Manager, Ivy · Los Angeles, CA

Founded and ran DAM Inc., a four-person digital marketing agency, at 22. Owned the P&L and a $450K client budget. Managed a $1M annual marketing budget at Ivy, a blockchain fintech, and held the role through the company's acquisition. Earlier roles at CallSource and Global Marketing Partners across brand campaigns, tradeshows, and product launches, starting May 2011.

Education

Degrees and current academic work

Rady School of Management, University of California, San Diego

Master of Business Administration · expected June 2027

Led a six-person Rady Venture Fellows team through customer discovery for KRTR.ai, an agentic VC platform.

University of California, San Diego

B.A. International Business, cum laude · December 2024

Minor in Entrepreneurship and Innovation. President's List. $20K in merit scholarships.
Founded UCSD's first student entrepreneurship club. Grew it to 150 members and secured $25K by pitching the chancellor.

Los Angeles Pierce College

A.S. Mathematics, cum laude · June 2022

President's List. Dean's Scholarship.

The research pipeline behind Mauralink's organizational-psychology knowledge base.

Source

Current record

Work and professional direction

Current work

Advise M&A, healthcare, staffing, and creative-services firms on where AI belongs in their operations and where it does not.
Lead teaching assistant across eight consecutive quarters at the Rady School of Management. Deliver full lectures in Marketing, Business Ethics, and Negotiations.
Lead a six-person Rady Venture Fellows team through customer discovery for KRTR.ai, an agentic VC platform.
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Target roles

Consulting and transformation
Corporate AI strategy and adoption
Enterprise technology and business operations
Healthtech and biotech-adjacent commercialization
AI-enabled marketing and growth