My Story: Engineering Blackbird.AI’s Constellation Narrative Intelligence Platform

Quick Answers

• What is narrative intelligence? Narrative intelligence is the discipline of detecting, analyzing, and responding to coordinated narratives that target organizations, executives, financial markets, and public institutions. It applies graph analytics, behavioral signals, and AI to surface manipulation patterns that conventional social listening tools miss.
• How does Blackbird.AI’s Constellation Narrative Intelligence platform detect narrative attacks? Constellation ingests data across the open web and other sources, maps the relationships among accounts, content, and hashtags into graphs, and applies machine learning to score risk, identify bot-like behavior, and surface coordinated campaigns. The visualization layer turns those signals into clusters that analysts can interpret as narrative attacks evolve.
• What does a Senior Software Engineer at Blackbird.AI work on? I help build the platform layer that turns raw data on accounts, content, and behavior into the graphs, scores, and visualizations analysts use to detect narrative threats. The work spans data infrastructure, machine learning integration, and full-stack web systems that make complex data legible to decision-makers.

In 2019, I was on a work trip in Cologne, Germany, when a message from Wasim Khaled landed on my screen. He asked for help with data visualization and product development for a project on narrative intelligence, misinformation, and disinformation. I grew up in Georgia, a country that has lived under the shadow of Russian propaganda for as long as I have been alive, so the topic was anything but abstract for me. I said yes, and that decision shaped the next seven years of my life.

Blackbird.AI’s Constellation 2.0 Narrative Intelligence dashboard, featuring project statistics at the top, engagement and post volume by platform on the left, and high-risk posts on the right. 

This is the story of how a two-week sprint became Constellation, the Blackbird.AI platform that today serves global enterprise and government clients. It is also a story about immigration, an O-1 extraordinary ability visa, and what it has meant to spend seven years writing code that defends truth.

When I joined the team in 2019, the demo was two weeks away. The founders had a design and a graph database, which was a rare choice for a product at that scale. Everything else needed to be built from scratch. I handled the website and product side. Paul Burkard, our Chief AI Officer, handled the data side. We had no QA testers. No infrastructure team. We all put on different hats during this time. We did not have enterprise-grade infrastructure. I worked ten to eleven hours a day. We came up with new ideas while building, iterated over and over, and shipped the MVP on time.

READ: The RAV3N Report: 2026 State of Disinformation Narrative Intelligence

The result was a 3D graph visualization dashboard in which users, hashtags, and posts formed clusters. Some clusters revealed bot-like behavior. Others surfaced toxic patterns. Patterns that looked like noise on a feed turned into structure on the graph. That visualization gave analysts a way to see coordination beyond surface content. Seeing it on screen was the moment I understood what we were building. It had the potential to mark the start of the narrative intelligence field, a completely new category of narrative threat at the time.

The most memorable moment of those early weeks came when Wasim and Naushad were on a flight to New Zealand for the demo. The product was incomplete. They were unreachable above the Pacific. I was on the other side of the world, awake through the night, working to finish the MVP. I had to make architectural decisions on my own, with no one available to consult. The MVP shipped. The demo worked. That presentation helped Blackbird.AI prove the concept, secure startup funding, and grow into a multimillion-dollar company. A two-week sprint became the foundation of a company that would define the narrative intelligence field.

In 2021, we started building Constellation 2.0. The first version had proved the concept. The second version had to scale. Constellation 2.0 needed to serve enterprise and national security clients, handle data volumes the prototype could not have supported, and run with the kind of reliability organizations demand from infrastructure they trust. The company grew. Blackbird.AI opened an office in New York. The engineering team expanded.

In 2023, I traveled to the United States for a Blackbird.AI off-site. It was the first time I met Wasim, Naushad, and many of my colleagues face-to-face. After four years of Slack messages, video calls, and shared deadlines across time zones, sitting in a room with the people I had been building alongside was clarifying. The shared mission felt sharper. The bond felt earned.

In 2024, my O-1 extraordinary ability visa was approved, which allowed me to relocate from Georgia to the United States. The transition was life-changing. I worked through professional, personal, and immigration challenges while building new relationships in a new country. Throughout that period, Blackbird.AI was a constant source of support. That year, I was promoted to Senior Software Engineer. The recognition reflected the work, and the work continues to expand. I now lead and own projects end-to-end, architecting and delivering the platform that powers our clients.

Narrative attacks outpace the institutions they target. State actors run influence campaigns at scale. Synthetic media spreads through the same pipes as authentic news. Coordinated networks shape financial markets, election outcomes, executive reputations, and public health debates. Executives, enterprise firms, governments, NATO allies, and more depend on infrastructure that detects manipulation in time to respond. Building and advancing this infrastructure is a work of clear national and global importance, essential to protecting enterprises, democratic institutions, economic stability, and public trust.

Constellation is Blackbird.AI’s purpose-built Narrative Intelligence Platform, designed to detect, analyze, and measure the risk of harmful narratives before they scale into financial, reputational, operational, or physical harm. The platform examines distinct signals across thousands of sources: the narratives themselves, the networks carrying them, the cohorts and communities connecting them, the anomalous behavior — including bot-like activity — that amplifies them, and the influence of the actors driving them. Constellation is multimodal, assessing text, images, and memes; multi-platform, spanning the dark web, social media, news, and more; and multilingual, supporting hundreds of languages. Narrative Feed, built on Constellation’s technology and the RAV3N Risk LLM, ranks emerging storylines using a Narrative Risk Score based on hundreds of risk signals that customers can tailor to their risk profiles, while companion tools such as Compass Context provide analysis and context to identify and contextualize online claims. 

We are building Constellation 3.0. The next generation of the platform extends what Constellation 2.0 made possible: faster detection, sharper context, broader integration with the AI agents and security infrastructure that enterprises run today. The engineering challenges keep growing. The mission keeps mattering.

From left to right: Blackbird.AIco-founder and CEO Wasim Khaled, me, Giorgi Gviniashvili, and Blackbird.AIco-founder and CTO Naushad UzZaman. From screens to real life! After 4 years working on the Constellation Narrative Intelligence platform, I finally met the CEO & CTO in person at the company’s first off-site in 2023.

The Way Forward – Key Takeaways About Narrative Attacks For Organization Leaders

• Trust the early team. The first MVP back in 2019 was built and shipped rapidly by a small team under tight constraints, long before the company had mature processes or production-grade infrastructure. The lesson for engineering leaders: a small team with clear ownership and a sharp deadline can ship work that proves a concept and changes a company’s trajectory. Process should follow product, never the reverse.
• Build the visualization layer, not only the data layer. Graph databases were rare in 2019. The data structure mattered. The visualization mattered more. Patterns that look like noise in a table become structure in a graph. Engineering leaders who invest in how analysts see data unlock decisions that the data alone cannot drive.
• Hire engineers who feel the mission. I took the call from Cologne in 2019 because narrative intelligence was personal for me. Seven years on, the mission drives the work. For organizations defending their reputation, executives, and customers from narrative threats, the engineers and partners you choose should care about the problem as much as they care about the contract.

The work I have done at Blackbird.AI is the most consequential of my career. The platform protects organizations against threats that did not have a name when we started. The team that hired me in 2019 has become the team I trust with my career, my immigration journey, and my belief that code can defend against narrative attacks.