Forward-deployed engineersEmbedded in your team.Hired & managed by us.

A forward-deployed engineer is a senior engineer who works embedded inside your team - in your standups, your repositories and your production environment - rather than delivering from a vendor's office. The model started at Palantir; every major AI lab now runs a version of it. &above, an embedded AI build partner in London, provides forward-deployed engineers as a service across the UK: we hire and manage the engineers, and they build with your team.

Building AI in-house is the right instinct. The system ends up owned by your team, and the knowledge compounds inside your organisation instead of a vendor's. The hidden cost is the burden that comes with it: hiring senior AI engineers is slow and risky, managing them pulls your staff away from the day job, and internal builds too often stall unmaintained once the first workflow ships. Forward-deployed engineers remove that burden without giving up the ownership. We carry the hiring and the management; the engineers work embedded in your team as if they were your own; and the capability transfers to your people as the work ships.

We deliver in two tiers. Forward-deployed engineers are the first: senior engineers embedded in your team against a scoped workflow. AI Product Squads add product management and design in the same embedded team, for when the harder question is what to build rather than how - see our full AI consultancy & product development services. And because &above does not sell a platform, the architecture is never optimised for one model provider - we build automation, agents and AI software on whatever stack fits your constraints.