Practice 02 — Forward-deployed engineers
Engineers in the room where the work happens.
Our forward-deployed engineers embed with your operations, finance, support or sales teams. They watch how work actually gets done, find where AI changes the economics, and build the tool — then stay until your team can run it without us.
Not consultants
They write production code, not recommendations.
Not a dev shop
They decide what to build by finding the problem first.
Not a pilot factory
Success is a tool in daily use, measured against a baseline.
The deployment gap
Demos don't stall on the model. They stall on the business.
A model can be capable and a prototype impressive while nothing changes. Production asks the hard questions, and they can only be answered next to the people doing the work. That is where we sit.
- Which workflow or decision should actually change?
- Which data and systems are the source of truth?
- Where does a person still have to make the call?
- How will anyone know when quality drops?
- Who owns it when the model, the policy or the process changes?
The method
From the shop floor to a tool your team owns
- 01
Shadow
Sit with operators. Record every task, handoff, workaround and spreadsheet.
- 02
Score
Rank tasks by volume, cost, error rate, data availability and risk of getting it wrong.
- 03
Spike
Build quick technical probes on the top candidates to test feasibility on real data.
- 04
Ship
Take the winner to production with evals, monitoring and a named owner on your side.
- 05
Hand off
Pair with your owners and rehearse recovery. We leave when your engineers can ship a change without us.
Where we deploy
The workflows that run your business.
Wherever skilled people spend hours on reading, routing, reconciling or writing — that's where we look first.
- Operations
Intake, triage, exception handling - Finance
Reconciliation, close, audit prep - Customer support
Resolution, routing, QA - Sales & RevOps
Research, proposals, CRM hygiene - Legal & compliance
Review, extraction, policy checks - Engineering
Internal tools, migrations, on-call
What you keep
Everything it takes to run it without us.
The code
Production code and infrastructure definitions, in your repositories.
The evals
Representative cases and eval suites that say when it breaks.
The judgment
Your operators' rules and exceptions as tested, versioned instructions — not knowledge in a consultant's head.
The runbooks
Monitoring, alerts, recovery procedures and escalation paths.
The decisions
Why it was built this way, what was ruled out, and the known limits.
The owner
A named owner on your side, trained by pairing, with a prioritized backlog.
Is this the right fit?
Not every problem needs an engineer in the room.
A good fit when
- The outcome matters enough to need production-grade engineering.
- The path to it isn't known yet — the answer is somewhere on the floor.
- The knowledge is spread across operations, data, security and engineering.
- It has to fit the systems and controls you already have.
- You want to own it at the end, not rent us forever.
Hire someone else when
- The requirement is already clear and a delivery team can just build it.
- An off-the-shelf product does the job with routine setup.
- You need extra coding capacity, not someone to find the problem.
- No one owns the process, or there is no route to production.
The discovery sprint
A fixed-scope first engagement. Low commitment, concrete output — and a clear go / no-go on building the top candidate.
What you get
- 01
A ranked opportunity map
Every task we found, scored by volume, cost, data availability and risk.
- 02
A working prototype
The top candidate, running on your real data in front of the people who'd use it.
- 03
A go / no-go recommendation
Whether to build it, with the baseline and evals to judge it by.
Done when
You have a clear decision on the top candidate and the evidence to back it.
Questions
What people ask before the first sprint.
How is this different from consulting?
Consulting often stops at the recommendation. Our engineers frame the problem, write the code, put it into production and measure it — one team, accountable for the result rather than the roadmap.
How is this different from staff augmentation?
Augmentation adds hands to work you have already defined. A forward-deployed team works out what to build, ships a bounded piece of it to production, and builds your team's ability to own it.
Will we end up depending on you?
Not by design. Exit criteria are agreed at the start, your owners pair with us throughout, and the tests, runbooks and decisions live in your systems. The engagement is done when your team can make and safely deploy a change on its own.
How do you measure success?
Against measures agreed before we build: the business result against its baseline, quality and incident rates in production, whether the intended people actually use it, and whether your team can run it without us.