One senior AI engineer, deployed inside your team, accountable for a system reaching production. A senior US AI hire: $300K+ and six months. This: $114K a year.
Forward deployed means the engineer works where your work happens: inside your codebase, your data, and your team's daily loop, not behind a ticket queue. RAG systems, LLM apps, agentic workflows, evals, MLOps. Deepest specialization: AI inside Ruby on Rails codebases, though our engineers ship in whatever stack you run.
A senior US AI hire runs $300K+ all in (salary, benefits, equity, recruiting) and takes about six months to land, competing with the AI labs for the same people. A Forward Deployed AI Engineer is $114K a year, inside your team in 7 to 10 days, replaceable within 120 days if it is not working. 96% client retention, Clutch verified. The full comparison.
Who this is not for: teams that want a body-shop rate card, or work with no executive sponsor. We will say so on the fit check.
Not sure what to build yet? Start with the AI Readiness Assessment: $2,500, two weeks, credited toward the build.
How is this different from staff augmentation?
Staff aug gives you capacity and leaves the outcome to you. A forward deployed engineer is accountable for a system reaching production: they run the eval loop, stage autonomy from sandbox to production, and answer for what ships.
How do I know the AI actually works?
Evals. Before anything gets autonomy we build a test set from your real cases and measure pass rates. You see the numbers before production does.
What do the first 90 days look like?
The 30 / 60 / 90 framework: first 30 days inside your workflows and codebase, working system in a sandbox by 60, evals passing and production rollout underway by 90.
The clearer the work, the faster we can match. If we cannot match in 10 days, we say so.