NeuraScaleNeuraScale
Retainer · $2k–$5k/mo · month-to-month

An FDE who ships, on your team, at half the rate.

A US-based specialist fractional CTO charges $300–500/hr. Most SMBs can't sustain that. We sit in the middle slot: an embedded engineer deep enough to pick the right model, write the tool contracts, and merge the PR — at $2–5k/month on EU hours.

Why fractional

You don't need an AI hire. You need shipped features.

You can hire a full-time AI engineer for $180k/yr in Berlin or $300k+ in SF. You can buy consulting decks for $30k. Both move the needle slowly.

A fractional AI engineer ships features every week, pairs with your real engineers, and leaves behind documentation so eventually you don't need us. It compounds without the burn rate.

Included monthly
  • One or two production PRs per week on your repos
  • Weekly 30-min pair session (async-friendly)
  • Slack/Telegram access with one-business-day SLA
  • Model + prompt + infra decisions documented in-repo
  • Direct introduction to every dependency we bring in
  • Monthly retro — what compounded, what didn't, what to kill
Fit

Good fit / bad fit. We say so on the call.

Good fit
  • •Live product, paying customers, AI is a missing feature
  • •Team < 15, one or two engineers, shipping weekly
  • •Needs one clear AI capability in production, not R&D
  • •Comfortable with async + 2–3h EU-timezone overlap
Bad fit
  • ×Pre-product, pre-customer, pre-PMF
  • ×Expecting 40h/week attention for $2k/mo
  • ×Only wants strategy or deck output
  • ×Hardcore US-only timezone with same-day SLAs
WEEK.LOG · samplemonth 2 · 7 PRs
monAsync standup · scope this week's 1–2 PRs
wedPair session · review staging branch
friPR shipped · runbook updated · costs logged
retroMonthly · what compounded, what to kill
FAQ

What clients ask before signing.

Consultants produce recommendations and decks. A Forward-Deployed Engineer ships production code and pairs with your team. Our retainer exists because SMBs don't need strategy — they need someone who merges PRs on Friday.
Compare: AI Consultant vs Fractional CTOAI Agent DevelopmentAI-First SaaS Development
Next step

Need a shipping AI engineer next week?

Book a 20-min call. Bring one feature you'd want merged to main. We'll tell you if it's a 2-hour or 2-sprint job.

18–24h reply · Cairo + EU hours · honest scoping