Senior engineering, without the agency theatre.
Four practices, one operating model: small teams, evidence over enthusiasm, and a handover planned from week one.
01 · 6–16 weeks · fixed scope or retained
AI engineering
LLM products, agents and retrieval systems taken from prototype to something you can put in front of customers.
Most AI work stalls in the gap between a convincing demo and a system that survives real traffic, real data and real edge cases. We close that gap: evaluation harnesses before feature work, guardrails and fallbacks by default, and cost and latency treated as first-class product requirements.
Talk about AI engineeringCapabilities
- LLM application architecture
- Agentic workflows and tool use
- Retrieval-augmented generation
- Evaluation harnesses and regression suites
- Inference cost and latency tuning
- Model routing and provider failover
What you get
- Production AI service with observability
- Offline + online evaluation pipeline
- Prompt and policy versioning
- Runbook and handover to your team
02 · 8–24 weeks · milestone-based
Product engineering
Full-stack web and mobile products designed, built and shipped by a small senior team.
We work the way a strong in-house team would: short cycles, working software every week, and design and engineering in the same room. TypeScript, React and Next.js by default, with the backend chosen to fit the problem rather than the résumé.
Talk about Product engineeringCapabilities
- Product discovery and scoping
- Interface design and design systems
- Next.js / React application development
- API and data modelling
- Payments, auth and integrations
- Accessibility and performance budgets
What you get
- Shippable product increments every sprint
- Design system and component library
- Test coverage on critical paths
- Documented architecture decisions
03 · 4–12 weeks · audit or build
Platform & cloud
The unglamorous layer that decides whether everything above it stays fast, safe and cheap.
Delivery pipelines, infrastructure as code, observability and cost control. We tend to arrive when deploys have become scary, bills have become surprising, or a team has outgrown the setup that got them to launch.
Talk about Platform & cloudCapabilities
- CI/CD and preview environments
- Infrastructure as code
- Observability, tracing and alerting
- Cloud cost reduction
- Security hardening and reviews
- Migration and modernisation
What you get
- Reproducible environments
- Deployment pipeline with rollback
- Dashboards and on-call runbooks
- Cost baseline and reduction plan
04 · 3+ months · monthly retainer
Embedded teams
A senior-led pod that joins your team, ships with it, and leaves it stronger than it found it.
Every Nexa pod pairs senior engineers with developers from our mentorship track. You get the throughput of a larger team at a sustainable rate, and the pairing culture that comes with it tends to rub off on your own engineers — which is rather the point.
Talk about Embedded teamsCapabilities
- Senior-led delivery pods
- Pairing and code review culture
- Technical leadership on loan
- Backlog triage and estimation
- Onboarding and documentation
- Knowledge transfer on exit
What you get
- Named team with a single point of contact
- Weekly demos and written updates
- Reviewed, documented, owned code
- A team that can keep going without us
Four phases, every time.
Whether it runs four weeks or four quarters, the shape is the same — and you can stop at the end of any phase.
- 01
Frame
A short paid discovery: we map the problem, the constraints and the definition of done before anyone writes code. You leave with a plan you could hand to any competent team — including one that isn’t us.
- 02
Prove
We build the riskiest slice first. Whatever is most likely to sink the project gets tested in week one, not week ten, so budget decisions are made with evidence.
- 03
Build
Weekly increments in your repository, your CI, your cloud. Demos every Friday, written notes the same day, no black boxes and no surprise integration weeks.
- 04
Hand over
Documentation, runbooks and pairing sessions until your team is genuinely independent. We measure success by how quickly you stop needing us.
We are not the right fit for everyone.
If you need thirty contractors by Monday, a fixed bid on an undefined scope, or a partner who will not push back on the plan, we will say so on the first call and point you somewhere better.
Next step
Bring us the part that worries you.
The riskiest slice is the one worth talking about first. Tell us what it is and we will tell you, honestly, whether we can help.
Or email hello@nexa.com · Austin, Texas · United States