Forward Deployed · DevOps
Deploys that stop being a risk event.
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.
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
What you get
Real DevOps Problems Fixed, From Day One
- Releases that go out on a Friday without anyone flinching
- Everything as code: environments, pipelines, infrastructure
- Alerts that mean something, owned by someone
- Your engineers doing it themselves after we leave
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
building and running production platforms for global brands
Days, not quarters
to the first measurable change in your delivery
1 named engineer
in your team, not a rotating bench
The problem
Delivery is slow, and nobody can point at one thing to fix.
Deploys need a specific senior engineer and a quiet afternoon. Staging does not look like production. Half the infrastructure was clicked into existence two years ago by somebody who has since left. Everybody knows what good looks like, but the team is too busy keeping the lights on to build it.
Hiring does not fix it quickly, and a consultancy that writes a strategy deck fixes it never. What actually moves the needle is a senior engineer who has done this before, working inside your team, on your codebase, shipping the change instead of recommending it.
Signals you will recognise
- Deploys take hours and need a specific person
- No reliable rollback path
- Production and staging have quietly diverged
- Alerts get muted because most of them are noise
- Every team has its own pipeline and its own outages
How it works
One senior engineer, in your team, shipping the platform with you.
Our engineer joins your standups, your repos, your incident channel and your on-call rota. Work lands as pull requests your team reviews and merges. Nothing is built in a parallel fork and thrown over the wall at the end.
We start with whatever is hurting most, usually the release path, then work outwards: environments, observability, then the paved road that lets your team do it without us. Flexible by design. Take an engineer for a day a week or full time, scale up for a push, scale down when the work is done.
Outcomes
Tangible outcomes, not a maturity score.
A release path anyone can run
CI that is fast and trustworthy, automated checks that catch the right things, and a one-click rollback that has been rehearsed rather than hoped for.
Infrastructure as code, end to end
Terraform (or Pulumi) modules in your repo covering the critical path, so environments are reproducible and drift stops being a mystery.
Observability you actually use
Metrics, logs and traces wired to the services that matter, dashboards a non-expert can read, and alerts that page a named owner with a runbook.
Environments on demand
Production-like environments created and destroyed from a pipeline, so testing stops being a queue and staging stops being a fiction.
A paved road your team wants to use
Golden pipeline templates, service scaffolding and sane defaults, so a new service ships in a day instead of a sprint.
Cost and reliability under control
Right-sized infrastructure, spend visibility per team or service, and SLOs that make the trade-off between speed and stability explicit.
How we embed
Clear stages. You're in control.
Day one: inside the team
Accounts, repos, Slack, standups. Our engineer reads the code and the incidents before proposing anything, and gives you an honest read within the first few days.
Week one: first change shipped
We pick the highest-pain, lowest-drama improvement and ship it. You see the working relationship before you commit to anything longer.
Steady state: your backlog, our hands
Work is prioritised with your lead in your tracker. Pull requests, reviews, pairing, on-call. Weekly written update on what shipped and what is next.
Exit: the capability stays
Docs and runbooks in your repo, your engineers already doing the work, and a taper rather than a cliff. You can end it whenever it stops paying for itself.
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.
Technologies
Certified, and hands on with it every day.
Our DevOps FDE engineers hold certifications in these tools and use them in production, not just on slides. If your stack is not listed, ask. We have almost certainly run it somewhere.
In practice
What working with us actually looks like.
Predictable releases. Faster time-to-market. Engineering effort that scales with revenue, not headcount.
- Your tools, your repos, your tracker. We do not import ours.
- Everything lands as pull requests your team reviews and merges.
- Named engineer, UK-based, background-checked. No rotating bench.
- Daily standup with your team, weekly written summary for your lead.
- Day rate or monthly rate. Scale up or down with a week's notice.
- We pair deliberately, so your engineers can run it without us.
FAQ
The questions we get before kickoff.
Do you replace our engineers?
No. We work alongside them. The point of the model is that your team keeps the platform and the knowledge after we leave, which only happens if they build it with us.
How quickly can someone start?
Usually within a week. We ring-fence a named engineer rather than assigning whoever is on the bench.
Do you work in our repos or yours?
Yours. Modules, pipelines and runbooks all land as pull requests your team reviews and merges. No black-box handover.
What if we only need a couple of days a month?
That is fine. The model is deliberately flexible. Plenty of clients run one day a week, scale up for a migration or an incident, then scale back down.
How is this priced?
A daily or monthly rate depending on how much of the engineer you want. Answer three questions in the quote funnel and you will see the numbers without talking to anyone.
Next step
Get a DevOps engineer on your team.
Three questions and you will see how our Forward Deployed Engineers work, who you get, and what it costs daily or monthly.