How is this different from staff augmentation?
Staff augmentation gives you capacity against a backlog someone else wrote. A forward deployed engineer is given a business problem and is accountable for the system that resolves it — including framing the problem, choosing the architecture, and carrying it into production. You are buying an outcome and an owner, not hours against a ticket queue.
Does the engineer work on site or remotely?
Both, in a pattern we will state plainly before you sign. On site for discovery and for cutover; distributed through the build and hardening phases with a committed daily overlap against your working hours. The full shape is set out in
where the engineer actually is. The part that matters more than geography: the engineer who sat with your operators is the one writing the code, so nothing is lost in a handoff.
Is this just offshore development with a new label?
It is a fair question to ask, and the honest test is whether the person who understood your problem is the person who builds the answer. In a traditional offshore arrangement they are not — an onsite lead gathers requirements and passes them to a delivery team who were never in the room, and the context degrades at that seam. We do not split those roles. The engineer is accountable for the outcome end to end, and part of the delivery happens from our India practice because that is where the build work is genuinely better served.
What happens to the work when the engagement ends?
It stays with you. Code lives in your repositories, infrastructure runs in your accounts, and documentation and runbooks are written as the work happens rather than assembled at the end. Capability transfer is a contracted deliverable with defined acceptance criteria.
How do you handle security, access and compliance?
Access model and data handling are agreed before any code is written, under your controls and your review. Our practice is appraised at CMMI Level 3 and certified to ISO 27001:2022, and we work comfortably inside regulated environments with existing security review processes and change control.
What size of problem justifies this model?
The useful test is not budget but ambiguity. If you can write a complete specification and hand it to a vendor, a conventional delivery model is cheaper and works fine. If the problem needs to be understood by someone sitting with your operators before it can be specified, this is the model that fits.
Can you work alongside our existing engineering team?
That is the intended arrangement. Our engineers join your standups, your code review and your release process rather than running a parallel track. On longer engagements, pairing with your engineers is how capability transfer actually happens.