AI engineering team, retained
AI engineering team, retained, with a fractional AI CTO
Plenty of good AI builds decay because nobody was staffed to run them. Models get deprecated, providers change pricing, evals drift and the one engineer who understood the retrieval pipeline leaves. Handing over a system with no team behind it creates a problem rather than solving one.
- Fractional AI CTO
- Retained engineering
- On-call and incidents
- Build-operate-transfer
Start a project
Step 1 of 5
Got it. An engineer is reading your brief.
You will hear from us within one business day, usually sooner. If it is urgent, email t@moher.ai.
Signs you need this
So we can be the team. A senior technical lead acting as fractional AI CTO, engineers who already know the codebase, and on-call for what we shipped. Or we build, operate to a defined milestone, and transfer the system to engineers you hire with our help.
- An AI system in production with no one internal to run it
- A founder making architecture calls without a technical lead
- Hiring an AI team would take a year you don't have
- Model deprecations and provider changes handled in a panic
- Several vendors, nobody owning the whole system
- A board asking for an AI roadmap nobody has written
What you get
What is included
Fractional AI CTO
A senior seat for architecture, model and vendor choices, security review, hiring plans and the AI roadmap, with a team behind it.
Retained engineering
Engineers on your codebase every week: features, model upgrades, eval maintenance and cost tuning, reported against agreed numbers.
On-call and incidents
Monitoring, alerting and incident response for the AI systems we run, with postmortems written down.
Build-operate-transfer
We build it, run it to a defined milestone, then transfer it to your team, including help hiring and onboarding them.
Provider and model management
Tracking deprecations, pricing changes and new models, and migrating with eval coverage so upgrades are safe.
A written exit
Every retained engagement specifies how it ends, from day one, for both sides.
How it runs
How we deliver AI engineering team, retained
- 01
Technical diagnostic
Two weeks, paid, on the codebase, infrastructure, costs and team. Either side can walk afterwards.
- 02
Engagement structure
Retained team size, fractional CTO hours, or a build-operate-transfer milestone. Written plainly.
- 03
Operate
Weekly reporting on shipped work, reliability, quality scores and inference cost.
- 04
Transfer or continue
Hand over at the milestone with runbooks and hiring support, or keep going. The agreement says which up front.
Industries we build this for
AI engineering team, retained questions
Something else? Email t@moher.ai and an engineer will answer it.
What does a fractional AI CTO do?
Owns the technical direction part time: architecture, model and vendor choices, security, hiring and the roadmap. Unlike an advisor, the role comes with engineers who build what gets decided.
How is this different from staff augmentation?
We own outcomes, not hours. The team works as a unit with its own lead, reports against agreed numbers, and is accountable for the system running.
What is build-operate-transfer?
We build the system, run it until it hits a defined milestone, then transfer the code, infrastructure and knowledge to your team. We can help recruit and onboard the engineers who take it over.
Can we take it in-house later?
That's the expected path. Runbooks, documentation and a working environment are produced throughout, not at the end.
What if it isn't working?
The exit is specified from the start. We'd rather end an engagement cleanly than defend one that stopped making sense.
Tell us what you need built
Four quick questions and an email. An engineer reads every brief and replies within one business day with next steps, and a written scope follows within a week.
- Written scope and price within a week
- Production deploy by week three
- Your repo and cloud from the first commit
- Senior engineers only, no account managers
Start a project
Step 1 of 5
Got it. An engineer is reading your brief.
You will hear from us within one business day, usually sooner. If it is urgent, email t@moher.ai.