Go-live without pulling your product team.
Forward-deployed engineering is a specific kind of work: sitting inside the customer’s environment, learning systems you did not build, and making the integration real without stalling your roadmap. We join the deployment, and leave the pattern behind when we go.
2–3 days / week
Per deployment, 30-day exit
One named senior engineer
From contract to go-live.
The systems exist. The customer exists. What is missing is the person willing to own the work between them.
- 01
A signed customer is blocked on an integration into systems your product team has never seen.
- 02
Your engineers are excellent at your product and slow at someone else’s SFTP, HL7 feed or 2009-era SOAP endpoint.
- 03
Solutions work is landing on whoever is least busy, and it shows up as slipped roadmap.
- 04
Every enterprise deal is turning into a bespoke build nobody has budgeted or staffed.
- 05
You need coverage for two or three deployments a year — not a full-time hire you can’t keep busy year-round.
- Legacy and on-prem systems — SQL Server, AS/400, Oracle, file drops, SFTP, fixed-width and EDI
- Systems of record — Salesforce, NetSuite, SAP, Workday, Dynamics, Epic and Cerner
- Internal APIs with no documentation and one person who remembers how they work
- Message and event layers — Kafka, SQS, webhooks, and the retry semantics nobody wrote down
- Identity and access — SSO, SCIM, VPN, private networking, customer-managed keys
- Whatever the customer’s security review demands before any of it can go live
We do not need to have seen your customer’s stack before. Reading unfamiliar systems quickly is the job.
One owner through go-live.
A forward-deployed engineer is measured by whether the customer is live, not by whether the ticket closed.
Sit on the customer side
Join their standups, their Slack, their integration calls. Learn their data model and the exceptions nobody documents. The point of an FDE is proximity, not tickets.
Own the integration end to end
Field mappings, auth, environments, error handling, backfill, reconciliation. Write the code, not the spec that someone else has to interpret three time zones away.
Translate in both directions
Turn customer requirements into product decisions your team can act on, and product constraints into something the customer’s stakeholders will accept.
Make the next one cheaper
Every deployment feeds back a connector, a documented pattern, or something the next customer can reuse, so the second customer in that vertical is a configuration and not a project.
Production workflow in 30 days.
Timings assume access lands in week one. If it does not, we say so in writing rather than quietly absorbing the slip.
Get inside both systems
Access to your codebase and the customer’s environment, a read of the contract and the integration commitments in it, and a first map of what actually has to move between the two.
One production workflow, end to end
One record, one workflow, end to end through the customer’s real endpoints in a non-production environment. Auth, mapping, failure cases and the first honest list of what is not going to work as sold.
Scale to production volume
Volume, backfill, reconciliation, retries, observability. The customer’s security review runs in parallel, with us answering it rather than your CTO.
Cut over and hand back
Controlled go-live, runbook, on-call rota, and a written pattern for the next customer that looks like this one. Your team keeps the code and the context.
Capacity without a full-time hire.
These are buying models, not the work. Pick the one that matches how lumpy your deployment pipeline is. Moving between them mid-engagement is normal.
Two or three days a week, one named engineer
The default. We join your delivery team for the length of a deployment — usually 8 to 16 weeks — and act as the engineer for that account.
- Monthly retainer
- Named engineer, not staff-aug
- 30-day exit either side
One customer, one integration, fixed scope
A defined integration for a defined customer, with an acceptance test written before we start. Best when the boundary is already clear and you want a fixed number attached to it.
- Fixed fee
- Written acceptance criteria
- Handover session on close
Engineers on call across accounts
For teams doing several deployments a year. A reserved allocation we draw against as customers land, plus ownership of the connector layer between engagements.
- Reserved hours per month
- Rolls across accounts
- Quarterly review
Rates depend on the depth of the customer environment and the compliance regime around it. We quote after a scope call, and we will tell you when a fixed-scope Deployment Sprint is the cheaper answer.
Named engineer, defined exit.
A named engineer on the account, in the customer’s meetings, with an exit written at the start.
- Named engineerAccountable for a customer outcome, not a resource assigned to a backlog.
- You talk to the person writing codeNo discovery deck, no six-week ramp, no account manager in between.
- In your timezoneOne engineer, in the customer’s meetings.
- Defined exitWritten at the start: your team can run, debug and extend the integration without us.