Startups Monthly Works with your team Month-to-month, notice at a month boundary

A fractional AI team,
without the hiring.

Hiring a senior AI engineer takes months, costs a lot, and is hard to evaluate if nobody on your team has built AI systems before. Borrowing the capacity is often the better trade until the role is obviously full-time.

WHEN THIS IS THE RIGHT SHAPE

You have engineers, not AI engineers

A capable team that has not built retrieval systems, evaluation harnesses or agent loops before. They do not need replacing — they need the specific decisions made alongside them once, and then they are away.

The workload is real but not yet full-time

Enough AI work to matter, not enough to justify a permanent senior hire. A fractional arrangement sizes to the actual demand instead of rounding up to a salary.

You are hiring but not there yet

A senior AI search realistically runs three to six months. Fractional capacity covers the gap and — usefully — helps you evaluate candidates, because someone on your side now knows what good looks like.

Something shipped and now needs owning

An AI feature is live and quality is drifting, costs are climbing, or nobody is watching it. Ongoing ownership is a different skill from building, and it is the one most often left unresourced.

HOW IT WORKS IN PRACTICE

A fixed number of days per month, agreed up front, working inside your systems: your repositories, your issue tracker, your standups. Not a black-box engagement that reports monthly — we would rather be a member of your team who happens to be part-time.

The explicit goal is to make ourselves unnecessary. Every non-obvious decision gets written down with its reasoning, so the knowledge stays when we leave. The goal is that teams engaging us fractionally are self-sufficient within a few months, and we consider that the successful outcome rather than churn.

Month-to-month with a notice period at a month boundary. No annual commitment, because a year-long lock-in for a startup is a bet on a roadmap that will change.

QUESTIONS

QUESTIONS — 4

Typical arrangements run from four to twelve days a month. Below about four days it is hard to hold enough context to be useful; above twelve you are usually better served by a scoped project or an actual hire, and we will say so.

A senior AI engineer in Western Europe costs meaningfully more than a mid-range fractional arrangement once you include employer contributions, equity, tooling and recruitment fees — and takes three to six months to arrive. Fractional starts in a week or two. The trade-off is real: a permanent hire gives you depth of product context and full-time availability that we cannot match. Past roughly full-time demand, hiring wins, and we will tell you when you cross that line.

Then the handover is the deliverable, and we plan for it. Documented decisions, architecture notes and onboarding time with the new hire. We will also sit in on technical interviews if that is useful — evaluating an AI engineer is genuinely hard without an AI engineer.

Not in a formal rotation with a paged SLA — that needs a team with proper coverage, and it would be irresponsible to pretend otherwise. What we do cover is quality monitoring, cost anomalies and model deprecations, which is where AI systems actually degrade. Infrastructure on-call should sit with whoever already owns your production stack.

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