Engineers inside your team who take AI agents
from pilot to production

A forward deployed engineer works inside the client’s environment rather than from a separate delivery centre. They join your standups, commit to your repositories, and talk directly to the people who run the workflow. The model comes from product companies that embed engineers with customers to make complex software work in real conditions. At tkxel it means a small pod that builds, ships, and then hands over production systems.

Staff augmentation adds people to your backlog and you direct the work. An FDE pod owns an outcome, such as a specific agent reaching production, and brings its own delivery method, evaluation tooling, and architecture experience. The pod also plans its own exit, so the engagement ends with your team owning the system rather than depending on extra headcount.

We work with the model and cloud your organisation has approved, including Claude, GPT, and Gemini models through their APIs or through Amazon Bedrock, Google Vertex AI, and Azure. Framework choice follows the workflow; we use established agent frameworks where they help and plain code where they add complexity. Everything is documented so your team can swap components later.

A typical pod is three to five people: a lead engineer, one or two AI engineers, and a data or integration engineer, with a delivery lead shared across the engagement. Most first agents reach a limited production release within two to three months. Larger programmes keep the pod longer while ownership transfers in stages.

No, and we would be cautious of anyone who does. Many workflows include decisions that should stay with a person for regulatory, financial, or customer reasons. We design autonomy per step, release with human review where accuracy is not yet proven, and widen it only when evaluation results support the change. Some steps may stay human-approved permanently, and that is often the right outcome.

The pod works inside your environment under your access controls, so data does not leave systems you approve. Connectors use least-privilege, audited access, and we align with your security review process from the first week. tkxel holds ISO 27001 certification, and we can work within SOC 2, HIPAA, or industry-specific controls your organisation already runs.

A named business owner for the workflow, access to real examples of the work, and at least one engineer who will eventually own the system. Clean data is helpful but not required; the discovery phase identifies data gaps and whether they block the first release or can be handled with review steps.