An AI feature the roadmap promised, a marketing site that should be converting, a frontend that fights every change.
The usual options are bad.
Agencies pitch you a discovery phase and staff the work with juniors behind an account manager. Hiring a principal engineer takes six months you don’t have, if the req is even open. Freelance marketplaces are a lottery.
What you actually need is an experienced engineer deployed inside your problem. In your codebase, with your team, accountable for shipping, and without the overhead of any of the above.
There’s a name for this model now: forward-deployed engineering. It’s how the big AI labs ship into their customers’ stacks, and it’s the entire model here: one engineer, embedded, fixed scope, fixed price. Pick the shape of the problem: