An AI feature the roadmap promised, a marketing site that should be converting, a frontend that fights every change.
The usual options are bad.
Agencies pitch you a discovery phase and staff the work with juniors behind an account manager. Hiring a principal engineer takes six months you don’t have — if the req is even open. Freelance marketplaces are a lottery.
What you actually need is an experienced engineer deployed inside your problem — in your codebase, with your team, accountable for shipping — without the overhead of any of the above.
There’s a name for this model now — forward-deployed engineering. It’s how the big AI labs ship into their customers’ stacks, and it’s the entire model here: one engineer, embedded, fixed scope, fixed price. Pick the shape of the problem: