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TechFabric

Build to compound

Leave your team able to do it without us

Our engineers work inside your team, on your priorities, in your repository. The handover is the point rather than the ending.

The work lands and the ability does not

Most outside engineering leaves you with software and no more capacity than you started with.

The knowledge leaves with them

The system works. Why it was built that way, and what it will do if you change this part, went home with somebody in a different company.

You are handed résumés

The engagement is staffed by whoever is on the bench, the people who scoped it are not the people who build it, and the first month is spent explaining the problem again.

The next thing needs them again

Which was the outcome the arrangement was structured to produce, whether or not anybody intended it.

A contractor takes a ticket. That is a legitimate thing to buy and it is not the same as buying a team that is stronger afterwards.

The shift

Three ways to buy engineering

They differ in what you have when it ends.

Staff augmentation

Capacity, rented

Résumés
Onboarding
Tickets taken
Contract ends
Back to square one

Outsourced delivery

A system, and a dependency

Requirements handed over
Built elsewhere
Delivered
Knowledge stays there
Call them again

Forward-deployed

A system, and a team that can change it

Embed
Build together
Patterns written down
Your people lead
We leave

How it actually works

Small, senior, inside your organisation. The arrangement is unusual mostly in how ordinary it looks from the inside.

In your repository

Your tools, your review process, your standups. Not a parallel project reporting in at a milestone.

Senior throughout

Fifteen years of production experience on average, and no pyramid with one architect over a floor of juniors.

The people who scoped it

The engineer in the first conversation is the engineer who builds it. There is no handover to a delivery team you have not met.

Design and product where the work needs them

One team rather than three subcontracts, so the interface and the data model are decided together.

Patterns written down

The reason a thing was built that way, recorded as it happens, because that is the artefact your team keeps.

An exit that was planned

Your people leading before we go, which is a phase in the plan rather than a conversation at the end.

15 yrs

Average production experience, per engineer

The same engineers, on both sides

The people who would embed with you are the ones who built Fabric, Airlift and Platform. That is the only durable answer to whether an outside team is any good, and it is checkable.

FAQ

Engineering capability: common questions

Is this staff augmentation?

No, and the difference is worth being blunt about. We do not do body-shop staffing. A contractor takes a ticket and a forward-deployed engineer takes the problem, which is a different arrangement with a different price and a different outcome.

How small can an engagement be?

One engineer on one problem is a normal way to start and often how a longer engagement begins. What we would not do well is supply four people to a plan somebody else wrote.

What happens when it ends?

Your team leads before we leave, and the written record of what was decided stays. If the arrangement ends with you needing us again, it did not work.