AI Agent Reliability Retainer
Forward Deployed Engineering for teams running AI agents in production — but with no one to call when they break.
Palantir, Anthropic, and OpenAI normalized Forward Deployed Engineering in 2025. Your AI agent breaks at 2am, customer support escalates, no one on your team can read a vector index. We embed as your on-call AI engineer: evals, observability, incident triage, prompt regression catches, model swaps. $6–12K/mo retainer, BD wages, US response times.
What you get
- ✓<2hr response time on production agent incidents
- ✓Eval suite catches 90%+ of regressions before they ship
- ✓Quarterly model swap + cost optimization (typical 30–50% inference cost reduction)
Who it's for
- —Series-A through C SaaS with at least one AI feature live in production
- —Companies that just shipped their first agent and are scared to touch it
- —Teams whose ML engineer left and the agent is now no one's job
How we work
A real engagement, week by week.
- 1Week 1
Audit
- Read every prompt, eval, retrieval stage, and tool spec
- Run our 30-point reliability checklist against your agent
- Deliver written report with severity-ranked findings
- 2Week 2–3
Baseline + tooling
- Set up eval suite (LangSmith or Braintrust, your choice)
- Wire observability (Helicone / Phoenix / OTel — your stack)
- On-call rotation: PagerDuty/Slack integration
- 3Month 2+
Steady state
- Weekly reliability reviews with your eng lead
- Incident response within 2 business hours (SLA)
- Prompt + retrieval improvements shipped through your PR review
- 4Quarterly
Model + cost optimization
- Benchmark current model against newer/cheaper alternatives
- Migration plan with rollback gates
- Inference cost report tied to revenue per agent call
Why us
Why this works at our cost base.
FDE delivery without FDE pricing — BD base = $200–250 fully-loaded daily rate
We've shipped production agents on Spring + Gemini (Iris/Nous) — we know the failure modes
Plug into your stack; we don't make you switch tools
Common questions
Things prospects ask first.
Yes — that's exactly the use case. We won't replace a head of AI, but we can hold the line on one to three production agents.
Yes. We're contractors with the same access patterns as a senior IC.
We're framework-agnostic — Python, TypeScript, Go, Java. We've shipped on LangGraph, OpenAI Agents SDK, Vercel AI SDK, and bare model APIs.
Out of scope. We focus on production reliability, not training. If you need fine-tuning we'll recommend a partner.
Audit can begin within 5 business days of signed SoW. Full retainer kicks in week 2.
Ready to start S2?
20-minute scoping call. We'll tell you straight whether it's a fit.