Service
Forward Deployed AI Engineering
Who it is for
Product and engineering leaders who need to ship an AI feature or agent on a deadline and cannot hire specialist AI security engineers fast enough.
When clients call
- An AI feature committed to a customer or roadmap date with no security engineering capacity
- An agent prototype that works in demo but is not safe to put in production
- A security review that found design problems your team does not have the specialists to fix
Scope
- Secure architecture and build of agent, retrieval and tool integrations
- Guardrails, permission boundaries and human approval gates implemented in code
- Evaluation and abuse-case test harnesses for pre-release and regression testing
- Deployment pipeline controls, logging and audit evidence
Method and standards
- OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications 2025
- OWASP Agentic AI threats
- MITRE ATLAS
- NIST AI RMF 1.0
Deliverables
- Working, reviewed code in your repositories
- Guardrail and evaluation test suite
- Architecture decision records
- Handover documentation and team walkthrough
Engagement arrangements
Dates, responsibilities and any ongoing review cadence are agreed in the written scope. Retesting is included where stated in that scope.
What happens after the scoping call
Written scope and fixed-fee proposal within one business day of your scoping call. The scope names the standards applied, the deliverables, the dates and the people doing the work.
Questions
Who does the engineering?+
Senior engineers engaged under NextZen scoping and quality assurance work inside your team and your repositories. Named CVs are supplied with every proposal.
How is this different from staff augmentation?+
The engagement is outcome-scoped: a defined capability shipped securely, with security decisions documented and tests your team can run after we leave. It is not open-ended seat filling.
How is the fee set?+
The written proposal defines the fixed fee, responsibilities and deliverables. Any change to scope is agreed in writing before additional work begins. Ongoing advisory includes an agreed review cadence and availability.
How is our evidence handled?+
Evidence is held under NDA, encrypted at rest and in transit, restricted to the named engagement team and destroyed on the schedule stated in the scope. It is never used to train any model.
Tell us what changed.
Thirty minutes, no obligation. Written scope and fixed-fee proposal within one business day of your scoping call.
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