Fractional AI Platform Team
Last verified: June 2026· engagement
We act as your AI platform team for 20–40 hrs/week and build whatever the roadmap demands — the highest-leverage option when you need momentum before you hire.
- Outcome
- A senior AI platform team, on retainer
- Timeline
- Ongoing
- Pricing
- $20–40k/mo, 3–6 month minimum
- Buyer
- Founders, VP Eng without internal AI talent
The problem
You need an AI platform team but can’t hire one fast enough — and the roadmap can’t wait two quarters for the first senior hire to ramp.
What we do
- Act as your AI platform team for 20–40 hrs/week against your roadmap.
- Build whatever moves the needle — cost work, evals, tooling, MCP, agents.
- Set the standards and patterns your future in-house team inherits.
- Transition out cleanly as you hire, leaving documented systems behind.
What you get
Built on our open source
brat — A multi-agent harness for AI coding tools — crash-safe state, parallel execution, one CLI.
Common questions about this engagement
Do you work under NDA?
Yes — we sign your mutual NDA before any data or repo access. For audits we prefer read-only access to start; for builds we work in a clean repo under your ownership.
Will we own what you ship?
Always. You own the code, the runbooks, the dashboards. We are explicitly set up to hand off and transition out, not to create dependency.
Vendor-agnostic — what does that mean in practice?
We integrate with what you already run — OpenAI, Anthropic, open-weight models on your cloud, your CI/CD, your observability stack. If a hosted vendor solves it, we will not reinvent it; if a self-hosted tool is the right answer, we will not pretend the hosted one is.
How is this different from a Big Four consulting deck?
We are the engineers doing the work, not analysts handing recommendations to a different team. The deliverable is working software in your repo, not a slide deck.
Can you work with our in-house AI team instead of replacing them?
Yes — most of our engagements pair with an internal owner and ramp them up to run the system after we leave. Many of our best engagements start with "we hired an AI team, help us get them productive."
Guides for this work
How to choose an AI engineering consultancy
Three very different businesses all call themselves an 'AI consultancy'; only one of them writes production code you own, and telling them apart is most of the buying decision.
Hiring & partnersHow to hire an LLM cost optimization consultant
Hire an LLM cost consultant when your bill is large enough to matter but your team is too busy to instrument, route, and eval their way out of it themselves — and only hire one who leaves you owning the result.
Let’s scope it on a call
Thirty minutes with an engineer. We’ll tell you straight whether this is the right first move for your team.