Every engagement follows the same structure: discovery & architecture (week 1), reproducible engineering (weeks 2-6), delivery & ownership transfer (week 6+). Fixed-price per phase, verified CI/CD gates, immutable build logs.
Phase 1 — Discovery & architecture (week 1)
Inputs
- Mutual NDA (MNDA standard or your own template)
- Read-only access to relevant systems (codebase, docs, logs)
- Stakeholder interviews (60-90 min total)
Activities
- Map data flows, agents, tools, and trust boundaries
- Identify constraints (latency, cost, compliance, integrations)
- Draft Architecture Decision Record (ADR)
- Define acceptance criteria with quantitative thresholds
Deliverables
- Written ADR (typically 6-12 pages)
- Fixed budget with milestones
- Delivery schedule with explicit dates
- Threat model with mitigation plan
Exit criteria
You countersign the SOW. No code is written before this signature.
Phase 2 — Reproducible engineering (weeks 2-6)
Pipeline
Each commit triggers, in order:
- Static analysis (TypeScript strict, Rust clippy, Python ruff)
- Unit + integration tests with deterministic seeds
- Inspect-AI evaluation suite against pinned datasets
- Build artifact production (binaries, images, model weights)
- Ed25519 signature of the artifact + manifest
- Append to Merkle-chained build log
- Deployment to the engagement staging environment
Cadence
- Daily async written status (Slack/email)
- Weekly 30-min sync (optional, async by default)
- Bi-weekly milestone demo
Failure handling
Any failed evaluation, missed SLO, or regression is reported in the same hour it's observed, with a root-cause hypothesis attached. No surprises at milestone review.
Phase 3 — Delivery & ownership transfer (week 6+)
Handover package
- Source repository with full commit history
- Signed releases + Merkle log root
- Inspect-AI evaluation suite + datasets
- Runbook (deployment, rotation, monitoring, incident)
- On-call playbook
- Architecture diagram + ADR finalised
- SBOM (CycloneDX)
- Model card when applicable
- Ownership-transfer letter (legally formalises asset transfer)
Training
Up to 2 sessions (1-2h each) with your engineering team to walk through the runbook, eval suite, and architecture. Recorded if requested.
Cooling-off
14 days of post-handover support included by default for clarifying questions and minor adjustments. Structured ongoing support is opt-in and quoted separately.
What we never do
- Hold production keys after handover
- Tie your codebase to proprietary tooling we control
- Use your data outside the engagement scope
- Ship code we cannot sign