ToProd

Forward deployed engineering crews

Your AI,
to prod.

Most AI pilots never reach production, so you opened a Forward Deployed Engineer role. Hire a crew instead of a req: ToProd sends a small team of senior engineers who embed with your operators, ship to production, and hand it over to your people.

Brief us on your role See engagements

Why a crew

One FDE hire is a long search for one person.

Forward deployed engineering is one of the fastest-growing roles in software, and the most contested. You compete with frontier labs and data platforms for the same few hundred people.

Open the req

  • Months of sourcing against OpenAI, Palantir and Databricks
  • Median US band of about $185K–$300K base, plus equity and recruiter fees
  • One person covering architecture, code, evals and change management
  • Headcount stays on the books when the program ends

Deploy a crew

  • Engineers on your problem in about two weeks
  • Lead, builders and evals covered by one team, for one fee
  • Scoped to an outcome, with a fixed end date
  • We help you hire or train the permanent owner, then step back

Pay band: Rungcode census of open FDE roles with disclosed US salaries, November 2026.

Engagements

Four ways to deploy us

Recon

Find the workflow worth automating

We sit with the teams doing the work, map where AI saves real hours, and leave you with a ranked list and a working prototype of the top pick.

2 weeks · fixed fee

Sortie

Ship one use case to production

A crew embeds with one business unit and takes a single workflow from prototype to production, with evaluation, monitoring and security review included.

6–8 weeks · fixed scope

Embedded crew

Your standing FDE team

A dedicated crew works your AI backlog quarter by quarter, across business units, as your internal forward deployed function.

Quarterly · monthly retainer

Bridge

Cover the seat while you hire

We do the job your open req describes, starting now. When you hire, we onboard your new FDE onto working systems and hand over.

Until your hire is ramped

How a sortie runs

From brief to production in six to eight weeks

  1. Week 0Brief

    Your job description becomes our scope. We agree on the workflow, the users, the success metric and the data we can touch.

  2. Week 1Embed

    We sit with the operators, shadow the work and wire into your systems inside your security perimeter.

  3. Weeks 2–5Ship

    Weekly releases to real users, measured against an evaluation set built from your own cases.

  4. Weeks 6–8Hand over

    Production rollout, monitoring, runbooks and paired sessions with the team that will own it.

What we build

AI inside the operation

Agents for operations

Claims intake, supplier follow-up, order exceptions, scheduling: multi-step work that today runs through inboxes and spreadsheets.

Document workflows

Leases, contracts, quality records and regulatory filings, extracted, checked and routed with a human approving where it matters.

Internal copilots

Assistants grounded in your own systems, with permissions respected, answers cited and usage measured.

Model and platform neutral

Anthropic ClaudeOpenAIAzure OpenAIAWS BedrockGoogle VertexDatabricksSnowflakePalantir FoundrySalesforceServiceNow

Built for operators in

ManufacturingConstructionLogistics & real estateInsuranceBanking & credit unionsPharma & medical devicesConsumer productsHealthcare

Contact

Got an open FDE req?

Send us the job description. Within two business days we'll reply with how a crew would cover it, a timeline and a fixed price.

hello@toprod.ai