Embedded Engineers on Contract

A funded programme waiting on a hiring round. The plan is signed off and the budget is committed, and the start date now depends on how long it takes to find people.

Or a delivery team short one senior role, with the date unmoved. Or a backlog that needs engineers rather than another roadmap. None of those is a defined output, so buying one as a fixed-scope engagement fits badly.

A private equity owner can meet all three in several portfolio companies at once, and our 100-day plan for AI in private equity portfolio companies sets out what an operating partner should see in the first three months.

One contract, a minimum of three months, on day rate commercials rather than against a deliverable.

• Who turns up

  A single senior engineer or a full team, sized to the programme and working inside it. The usual roles are an AI or platform architect, an AI engineer, and a data or platform engineer. Our guide to the AI solution architect role sets out where an architect's work ends and an engineer's begins.

• The standard

  Every engineer meets the same bar as the rest of 1AYM: certified on the platforms we build on, or shipped inside a top-tier engineering organisation.

• Who directs the work

  You do, day to day, in your own backlog and your own stand-ups. We hold the standard and the cover, so a stream never hangs off one person.

• Weekly review

  One of our architects reviews the work each week, so an embedded engineer is never the only senior pair of eyes on a design.

• Swap or scale

  Changing a role, or adding one, happens under the same contract rather than through a new procurement round. If you already have a scoped job, 1AYM can also resource it on contract from the collective of associates who work with the firm, held to the same bar as the rest of 1AYM.

A US engineering organisation that needs AI developers now, rather than after a hiring round, can bring them in on contract, and the engineers join your team the way a new hire would: your accounts, your repositories, your stand-ups and your code review.

They come from 1AYM's people in the US and the UK and from the collective of associates who work with the firm, every one held to the same standard. If your team already has a scoped job, 1AYM can resource it on contract from that collective.

• The contract

  One contract with 1AYM's US entity covers the roles, the term and the rate.

• Access and identity

  Engineers work under identities your organisation issues, in your repositories, cloud accounts and ticketing, with access scoped to the work. Offboarding is revoking the accounts you issued.

• Who owns the code

  The work sits in your repositories from the first commit, and copyright in it is assigned to you where the contract needs it.

• Supplier review

  Your security and procurement teams review 1AYM as they would any other supplier, and 1AYM holds the relevant insurance.

The work, in your repositories and your environments, built the way your own engineers build. Nothing depends on a system only we can reach.

A clean handover at the end, or a conversion to a fixed-scope build once the work is defined enough to price against an output.

When the outcome is defined, buy the outcome. A feasibility sprint settles what to build, and an architecture and production build ships it. Both are priced against a deliverable rather than a day, which is the cheaper trade whenever the deliverable can be written down.

When what is missing is ownership of the architecture and the build rather than extra hands, a retained implementation team is the closer fit.

A software company staffing its first AI product features has a narrower version of this choice, and our guide to partnering, hiring or both sets out when each route fits.

If you are still weighing a contract against a permanent hire or a freelancer, our guide to hiring an AI engineer sets the four routes side by side, including who owns the code and what drives the cost.