Engagement model · Forward Deployed Engineers
Senior engineers who fix your hardest problems.
Releaseworks® Forward Deployed Engineers embed with your team, in your repos, your standups and your incidents. A day, a month, or longer, scaling up and down as the work changes. Whatever your challenge, we have solved it before, at scale.
Partnering with Releaseworks really raised the bar for us; transparent, structured and professional. It feels like our company motor just got a powerful, high-performance upgrade!
Carola KrasCOO & Co-founder, iClaim
The model
Rockstar Engineer In Your Team, Right Now
- One senior engineer, embedded in your team and accountable for outcomes
- Deep expertise across DevOps, AI and Security, on tap from day one
- Starts in days, shipping into production in the first week
- Daily or monthly, scale up and down as the work changes
Three questions. No call required.
Partnering with Releaseworks really raised the bar for us; transparent, structured and professional. It feels like our company motor just got a powerful, high-performance upgrade!
Carola KrasCOO & Co-founder, iClaim
We have shipped production systems for
20+ years
shipping production systems for global brands
$5bn+
of revenue protected by systems we have built and run
Days
from agreeing scope to an engineer inside your team
The problem
Consultants leave a deck. Contractors leave a gap.
The hardest problems in your product are the ones nobody on your team has the time or the scar tissue to solve. Traditional consulting answers that with a discovery phase, a slide deck and an invoice, then leaves the actual work with you.
Staff augmentation answers it with a body you have to manage, brief and review, who leaves the moment the contract ends and takes everything they learned with them.
Forward Deployed Engineering is neither. Our engineer sits on your side of the wall, owns an outcome, and makes your team better at running it.
Signals you will recognise
- A critical problem that has been on the roadmap for three quarters
- A report full of recommendations nobody has had the capacity to execute
- Contractors who shipped, then left with all the context in their heads
- A team that is good but has never done this particular thing before
- Work that needs to start now, not after a two-month procurement cycle
Why the model works
Flexibility and senior expertise, without the ramp-up.
Flexibility. Engage daily for a bounded problem or monthly for sustained work, and move between the two as the work changes. Scale up when it is heavy, scale down when it is not, without a multi-year commitment or a change request for every adjustment.
Expertise, immediately. You get an engineer with 10 or more years of production experience in exactly the area you are struggling with, and behind them the rest of the team across AI, Security and DevOps. No ramp-up on your budget, no learning on your incidents.
Ownership. Our engineers own outcomes, not tickets. They make the call, ship the fix, and stand behind it in the retro, alongside your engineers rather than across a contract boundary from them.
What you get
What a Forward Deployed Engineer brings
A senior engineer inside your team
One named Releaseworks engineer in your repos, your standups, your incident channel and your backlog. Not a project manager relaying tickets.
Work shipped, not recommended
Pull requests, pipelines, infrastructure and running systems. Output is measured by what is live, not by pages of findings.
Expertise across AI, Security and DevOps
We match the engineer to the problem, and pull in the rest of the team when your problem crosses into another discipline.
Capability left behind
Every decision is made in the open with your engineers. Runbooks, patterns and reviews so your team keeps running it after we step back.
Flexible commitment
Daily or monthly. Scale up when the work is heavy, scale down when it is not. No multi-year lock-in, no change-request theatre.
No handover cliff
We ramp down deliberately, with your team already owning the work, rather than dropping a repo and a deck on the last Friday.
Is this for you?
See if we're a great fit for you.
For you if
- You have a real system in production and a problem your team cannot get to.
- You want engineers who ship, and who make your own team stronger while they do it.
- You value senior judgement over headcount, and outcomes over hours logged.
Not for you if
- You want a written recommendation and nothing built.
- You want the cheapest hands you can find to work through a backlog.
- You need a fully managed team to own a product end to end with no involvement from you.
How it works in practice
Clear stages. You're in control.
Match
You tell us the problem in three questions. We put forward the engineer who has solved it before, with the rates in writing.
Embed
Access, tooling and introductions in days, not months. Your standups, your board, your incident rota, your definition of done.
Ship
Real work into production from the first week. Weekly demos so progress is visible to your team and your board.
Transfer
Your engineers take the wheel while ours are still there to catch things. Then we scale back, or move on to the next problem.
Why Releaseworks®
A team you can trust with production.
Senior engineers, based in London
Over 20 years building and running production SaaS and business-critical platforms for global brands across finance, health, and retail.
Full-time, background-checked staff
No subcontractors, no offshore handoffs. The person on the kickoff call is the person writing the code.
Embedded with your team
We work in your repo, your tools, and your standups, so your engineers see every decision and keep the capability after we leave.
Trusted advisors, not vendors
Founders and CTOs keep us on speed-dial long after the engagement ends, because we tell them the truth and stay accountable for outcomes.
The disciplines
Three disciplines. One way of deploying.
Same operating model across all three: engineers embedded, outcomes owned, capability transferred.
AI FDE
AI in production and across the delivery org, not just in the IDE.
Your senior engineers are the best asset you have. Our Forward Deployed AI engineers embed with them and turn AI into real throughput: the right tooling for your stack, wired into the daily work of engineering, design, QA and product, with the quality checks that keep the speed safe.
Security FDE
Close the doors you cannot see, and prove it to customers.
Most breaches do not come from clever attackers. They come from unmonitored doors, unowned systems and security bolted on too late. Our Forward Deployed security engineers work inside your team to find what is exposed, shut it down, and leave software that is defensible by design.
DevOps FDE
Ship faster, break less, and keep the platform after we leave.
Our Forward Deployed platform engineers embed with your team and turn ad-hoc deployments into a reliable, observable, self-service platform your engineers actually want to use. Same repos, same standups, same on-call rota as your team.
FAQ
The questions we get before kickoff.
What does a Forward Deployed Engineer actually do?
The same work your best engineer would do, on the problem you cannot get to. They join your standups, pick up work on your board, write code in your repos, respond to incidents, and make architectural calls in the open with your team. The output is running software, not a report.
How fast can one start?
Usually within days. Once you have the rates and we have agreed scope, the bottleneck is access and onboarding, not our bench. Most engagements have work in production inside the first week.
Who do we get?
A full-time Releaseworks engineer, UK-based, background-checked, with 10 or more years shipping and operating production systems. No subcontractors, no offshore handoffs. We match the engineer to your problem across our AI, Security and DevOps disciplines.
How do we engage them, daily or monthly?
Either. Daily suits focused, bounded problems. Monthly suits sustained work where you want the engineer fully part of the team. You can move between the two, scale up when the work is heavy, and scale down when it is not.
What happens when the work is done?
Your team already owns it. We work in the open, document as we go, and ramp down deliberately, so there is no handover cliff. You can keep us on for the next problem, move to ongoing Care, or take it from there.
Do you sign NDAs?
Yes, as standard. Everything we build with you is yours.
Next step
Get an engineer on your side of the wall.
Three questions and you will see how our Forward Deployed Engineers work, who you get, and what it costs daily or monthly.