Frontier AI engineering — Services

Engagement shapes

Four shapes, increasing in commitment. The right shape depends on whether you need an architecture review, a shipped artifact, an ongoing partner, or full ownership of the AI stack.

Advisory

Scope: AI architecture review + monthly LLM strategy pressure-test. Model choice, eval design, failure-mode mitigation.
Duration: 4-6 hrs/month, ongoing.
First-month deliverable: AI stack audit + production-readiness assessment. Named gaps with prioritized fix sequence.

Project

Scope: Production AI feature build — RAG, agent, eval pipeline, orchestration layer. Defined-scope shipped artifact.
Duration: 6-12 weeks, defined scope.
First-month deliverable: Technical design + eval infrastructure + first production deployment by close. Documentation handed to your team.

Retainer

Scope: Embedded AI engineering partnership. Continuous integration of new model capabilities, ongoing eval work, prompt iteration.
Duration: Month-to-month, 6-month minimum.
First-month deliverable: First eval framework iteration shipped + prompt-deployment pipeline live + documented failure-mode inventory in month one.

Embedded

Scope: Acting head of AI engineering for the engagement window. Owns architecture, deployment, and the bar for production AI quality.
Duration: 3-6 months, 3-4 days/week.
First-month deliverable: AI architecture documented + first production deployment shipped + eval infrastructure foundations live + team onboarded by end of month one.

What “production-grade” means here

The phrase carries a specific stack: eval infrastructure that fires on every change, continuous deployment of prompts (not just model versions), confidence thresholds and refusal patterns on the retrieval layer, and a documented bar for what ships vs. what waits. Frontier capability that lives in a notebook is not production. The engagement bar is “deployed, observed, iterated.”

If your stack is pre-production and you’re solo, the playbook covers most of what the advisory shape does — for $149, not $5K a month.