How clients work with us
Senior engineering for web products, the services behind them, and the AI features going into them. Pick the engagement that matches how well defined the work is.
Start a briefThree ways to work with us
Contract / hourly
A senior engineer inside your team, billed by the hour.
A good fit when
- Your team needs senior capacity for weeks or months, not one deliverable.
- The work will change as you learn, so a fixed scope would be guesswork.
- You want someone working in your repository, your tools and your review process.
Scoped project
A defined outcome at a fixed price, agreed before work starts.
A good fit when
- You can describe what done looks like before work starts.
- You want one agreed price and one delivery date instead of a timesheet.
- Your team will take over the result once it ships.
Diagnostic sprint
A fixed-length sprint that ends in a written plan and a thin working slice.
A good fit when
- You're weighing an AI feature or a rebuild and want evidence before you commit a budget.
- Part of the product is slow, fragile or expensive to change, and nobody has had time to find out why.
- You want a plan your own team could carry out, with or without us.
Not sure yet
Describe the problem and we'll recommend a path.
The diagnostic sprint
One problem, a fixed number of days, and a written plan plus a thin working slice at the end. Most sprints look at where AI fits in an existing product, or at a product system that has become hard to change.
- Length
- 10 working days
- Scope
- One problem, agreed in writing before day one
What you get
- A written plan covering what to build, in what order, what to leave out, and the risks we found.
- A thin working slice in your codebase that proves the riskiest part of the plan.
- Effort estimates for the follow-on work, split into pieces you can approve one at a time.
- A walkthrough call with your team on the last day.
What it doesn't include
- Production rollout. The slice proves the approach. Hardening and release are follow-on work.
- A second problem. That is a second sprint.
- Support after the walkthrough, unless you continue with a contract or a scoped project.
What we need from you
- Access to the code and the systems involved from day one.
- One person who can make scope decisions and join two short calls a week.
- Whatever you already know about the problem, such as metrics, incident notes or earlier attempts.
After the sprint
The plan and the slice are yours either way. If you want us to build the rest, the work continues as a scoped project or as contract hours. We write the plan so your own team can carry it out too.
Work behind the offer
From client contracts and in-house product teams. Names withheld.
- Payments, cancellations and exchanges for the point-of-sale web app of one of the three largest travel distribution systems, built inside a PCI-compliant environment.
- A conversational flight search and booking assistant on AWS Bedrock, built with a three-person team.
- AI-assisted development guidelines adopted by eight engineering teams and applied across more than 170 front-end packages.
- The complete front end of a US startup's image-processing and data-entry product, which replaced a manual preparation workflow.
Start a brief
A few lines are enough. We read every brief and usually reply within two working days.
Prefer email? Write to christopher.horn@hornxengineering.dev.