1—2
senior engineers, on-site
Forward-Deployed Engineering is the engagement shape we've been refining since 2014 — and it's how Accord works best. One to two senior engineers, embedded inside your Hong Kong operation on a weekly cadence, writing software against the actual workflow rather than the brief you wrote in a vacuum. The fastest path we know from messy ops to production software you and your team can read.
Most "outsourced" engagements end with the vendor halfway across town, behind Slack, behind a project manager, behind a third invoice you didn't expect. Forward-deployed is the opposite shape.
Our engineers sit in your office on a recurring weekly schedule. They learn your workflow by watching it run. They ship small internal tools that compound across months, in the languages your team actually speaks. They don't go "black-box" — every change is in your repo by end of day.
Free 45-min intro call, then two on-site days where one of our engineers shadows your operation. We leave you a written scope, a recommended team shape, and a fixed working-day quote. If you decide not to proceed, you keep what we wrote.
The first piece of software ships inside two to three weeks — chosen because it’s the smallest thing that removes a real bottleneck. Boring stack on purpose. Your team uses it on a Monday, we adjust it on a Tuesday.
Same engineers, same standup, same demo slot every week. The internal tools compound — a dispatch view, an admin, a data pipe, a kitchen tablet. Each one paid for the engagement that built it; the next one runs cheaper.
When you’re ready to run things alone, the handover is already built in — runbooks, code documentation, recorded walk-throughs, your in-house developer on every PR review. We stay reachable. We don’t hold the keys.
We don’t publish a sticker price on this page because Custom / FDE engagements require us to understand your scope first. Every quote we produce is built up the same way:
(working days × engineer day rate) + capped expenses. The day rate is fixed for the engagement. Scope changes are agreed in writing before any extra work happens — no surprise invoices, ever.
The first 2 weeks are explicitly scope-only: we shadow your operation, leave a written scope and recommended team shape, and only then quote the full engagement. If you don’t proceed past scope-only, you keep the scope doc.
Shorter than that, FDE doesn’t produce real leverage — it’s just expensive consulting.
We bill in working days, not hours — no hourly-creep, no clock-watching.
Travel, infra, third-party tooling — all itemised, all capped per month, all approved before charge.
If scope shifts mid-engagement, we write it down, agree it together, then do it — never the other order.
Every tool we ship lives in your GitHub org from day one — typically 3 to 6 small focused tools by month four.
A written ops manual for every tool: how to run it, how to recover from common failures, who to call.
Every demo recorded and added to a shared library — your team and your future joiners can replay how a tool was built.
For AI work, an eval harness so changes can be measured. For ops work, structured logs + a sensible dashboard.
From week one, we agree what handover looks like: which engineer becomes your in-house pair, what the rollover criteria are, when we step out.
When the engagement ends, the people you worked with stay reachable on email and Slack. Not a hotline, not a ticket queue — the same humans.
Tell us what you're trying to fix. The first call is free, 45 minutes, no deck. We'll tell you honestly whether FDE is the right shape — or point you to a better partner if it isn't.