A senior engineer in your repo and standups

The phrase rent an AI engineer hides three purchases. One is a staff-aug ticket pile: someone takes Jira, writes functions, and leaves when the hours run out. One is a consultancy pack: interviews, a deck, and a partner who joins the steering call. One is a senior seat in the tools the team already uses, measured on a named outcome. Nidrosoft sells the third. Cyriac Zeh joins the repo and the standups. He stays long enough to watch Friday. He leaves files a new hire can open.

Monthly is the billing shape people want when they are tired of a six-month statement of work that starts with discovery theater. It is also how a seat can stop. A project SOW that never names an end date becomes a person you cannot fire. We still refuse to start the month blind. The audit writes the outcome. The month pays for the chair.

Cyriac Zeh founded Nidrosoft LLC in San Diego after design and engineering roles at Anthropic, Microsoft on Bing and Edge, Intuit, and Gap Inc. The studio has shipped 125 products and keeps 16 systems public. The person in the thread is the person who will commit. There is no junior bench behind a partner who flies in for kickoff. That is good for judgment. It is a hard limit if you wanted four squads. Say so early and hire a shop.

The consulting page already names this seat. This URL exists because rent an AI engineer is what people type. The method stays Embed, Diagnose, Scope, Build, Own. Diagnose still happens before the first paid month. Scope names what runs, what a person approves, and what you measure. Own means Tuesday does not require our Slack.

The seat lives where the team already works. GitHub, GitLab, or the host you already pay for. Linear, Jira, or the board the standup walks. Slack or Teams for the thread that holds the unofficial path. The CRM, inbox, practice software, or dealer board if the outcome sits there. Cyriac asks for a time-boxed role with logging, not a personal admin account he will keep forever. Security can revoke it. That revoke test is part of Own.

He will be on the standup invite. He will walk the board. He will take the ticket that unlocks the outcome, and he will say when a ticket is theater. If the team already pairs, he pairs. If the team already reviews every pull request, he reviews and he expects review. A rented engineer who cannot accept a no on a pull request is a guest, and guests do not belong in production.

Staff augmentation sells hours against a backlog you already wrote. This seat sells a result you can write in a paragraph. Overnight, the desk contacts private sellers who match the buy box, a person approves any offer, and the CRM shows the thread. That is a Nexuvo-shaped result. The practice receives a complete intake before the chair, a person confirms clinical exceptions, and no-shows drop by a number you already track. That is an Omnira-shaped result. We will not start a month on add AI to the repo.

Prompts live next to the code. Evals start as the sheet you already have, then move beside the deploy path so a model swap is a reviewable change. Keys live in your vault. Nerlude exists because founders lose credentials in Slack. If a vendor platform hides prompts and traces, ask whether you still own the system after they raise prices.

Week one of the audit is Embed. Cyriac sits with the people who do the job. He watches intake, outreach, scheduling, reconciliation, notice prep, inventory hunt, ticket grooming, or whatever repeats. He asks what the team already tried with Copilot, ChatGPT, or a playground key on production traffic. The paste history is data. He also sits with the owner of the system of record. Without that person, the map will lie about access.

Week two is Diagnose and the first pass of Scope. Each recurring task gets hours, feasibility, and payback. Feasibility includes API reality, data quality, and whether a human approval step will satisfy counsel. Payback includes time returned and error avoided. The packet names the first outcome for the embed, or it names a different buy: seats, a training sprint, an in-house hire, a shop on a spec. Stopping after the packet is a complete purchase. Many teams should stop.

How-we-work describes a common shape after the map: plan in the following window, implement and train in a later stretch often listed as weeks five through ten for the first system. A monthly embed can occupy that window, or extend past the first outcome if a second process is already ranked. Dates move with access and vendor APIs. We would rather rewrite the calendar than ship a sandbox and call it production. If you already have a strategy pack, a shop, or Copilot, bring those leftovers. An embed that ignores prior spend will duplicate it.

The usual fork is a headcount request, a consultancy RFP, or a studio seat. Those three leftovers are different objects. Averaging them into one scorecard produces a statement of work nobody can deliver. Use the rows as written. Score the leftover you want, then pick the row that leaves it.

Hire in-house when the function will outlast any vendor and you can wait for the search. Use the audit to write the job description if you want, then run the search. Hire a consultancy when the leftover is a pack the board can vote on, a vendor shortlist your engineers will staff, or a specified app a bench can cut. Those fail when the work is an unofficial Friday path and the partner who sold the work will not sit in it. Hire the Nidrosoft embed when the process repeats, a decision maker will grant a write path, and you want Cyriac in the thread until an operator can run Tuesday. If a pack and a repo run in parallel, write the boundary so they do not share one invoice.

Price is missing because it would be fiction. Loaded salaries differ by city and level. Consultancy retainers differ by leftover. Nidrosoft scopes the seat after the audit, once access and volume are visible. A 40-person clinic and a 200-person software company are not the same object. If a page you read elsewhere lists euros per month for a different firm, that number is theirs. Book an audit. We will not invent a monthly figure to look complete.

The first week of a scoped month is still watching, even after an audit. The unofficial path shifts. A field in the dealer system stays broken. A support macro that looked safe now sends. Cyriac re-checks the hours against the board. He opens the first branch in your host. He writes the approval table: which object, which field, who approves, what is logged. If that table cannot be explained to a new hire, the week is not done.

Mid-month is pairing and review. Someone on your side sits on the connector, the prompt file, and the failure path. They need to be the person who will operate the workflow after the seat pauses. Those people become the trainers for the next team if you later buy transformation. Under 30 people, the founder should see the approval step. Past 250, the department sponsor should see it.

The same week as the happy path, the runbook gets the fallback: a retry, a queue, and a human. Eviction files, dental exceptions, and dealer offers fail in public if the fallback is hope. Cyriac makes the operator run the wrong-model path once while he is still on the invite. If a sponsor wants a second process in the same month, we reopen Diagnose in writing. A verbal yes in a hallway is how extra agents appear.

Remote is the default. Cyriac lives in San Diego. Pacific Time covers most United States overlap. On-site days are available, including San Diego, La Mesa, and the rest of Southern California, when a week on the floor will change the diagnosis and that week is in the scope. We will not invent a local office to win a search. If you require a badge in the building every morning, hire a local firm.

We build in your cloud or your SaaS tenant when the work allows it. Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, Cloudflare, private infrastructure, multiple tenants. EU hosting and EU data residency when required. Approved access. Audit trails. If counsel needs a region, write it in the first week of the audit. San Diego is where Cyriac lives, not where your data is required to sit.

Staging matters. We will ask for a copy of the CRM, a sample of the inbox, or a time-boxed production role with logging. Building only in a designer's head produces a demo that dies on the first real record. If security needs a week to grant the copy, the calendar waits. That wait is cheaper than an incident. We will document write permissions in a table the operator can read.

Model choice is a means. Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, or a hosted model on your cloud can all appear. We pick for the task and the policy. TokenTra-shaped visibility belongs in any embed that will spend real money on tokens. Teams have cut 10 to 30 percent of wasted spend when they can see tokens by feature. If you already waste that slice, fix the bill in parallel or the new agent will hide in the same invoice.

Connectors are part of the month. A model that cannot see the dealer board, the practice schedule, or the ticket queue is a chat window with extra steps. We will say no to a scope that assumes a human will paste every record into a prompt forever. Money, contracts, and customer sends stay under a person. Nexuvo can reach a seller. A person buys the car. Eviction Wizard can assemble a path. A person files. TokenTra can flag waste. A person sets the budget.

After the audit you own the packet. After the embed you own the running system, the code you accepted, the prompts, the eval notes, and the operator runbook. Keys sit in your vault. Logs sit where you can keep them. You do not own Nidrosoft products unless you license them. You can take every leftover to another firm, or to the in-house hire you were going to make anyway.

Ownership includes the right to stop. A map that says hire internally is a complete engagement. A first outcome that you pause after the operator can run it is complete. Write the pause rule into the first scope so finance and engineering share one sentence. Files go in your drive and systems in your tenant. You do not have to buy Nerlude. You do have to have a place for keys and runbooks.

• Running workflow in accounts you control
• Source you can build without us on the call
• Prompts and eval notes you can edit
• Runbooks for the named operator
• Keys stored in your vault, revocable
• Logs you can keep for audit
• Human names on money, contracts, and customer sends
• The ranked map, even if you never buy the chair

Protectron-shaped trails belong if you operate under the EU AI Act or sell into teams that do. The embed can fund the habit. It cannot replace counsel. Write that into the scope. Playbooks stay in your drive. Strategy packs from another firm stay theirs to update. Do not mash the files. New hires and assistants will quote the wrong one.

The usual fit is 30 to 250 people, a named owner, and a workflow that repeats. Software teams with a repo already live in the shape this page describes. Clinics, dealers, funds, landlords, factories, and retailers fit when they can grant a tenant or a repo-shaped home for prompts and runbooks. The industry pages exist so those searches have a home. The seat does not change.

Under 30, one later build must pay for itself and the founder should be in the audit. Past 250, one department goes first with an internal sponsor. An enterprise banner with no first desk is a communications program. Read the enterprise implementation page and still pick department one. We will not accept a company-wide embed in month one.

Decision makers who cannot grant any environment should buy training or seats first. An embed that pretends to implement without a write path becomes a series of workshops with an engineering invoice. We will redirect you rather than take that invoice. If your buyer is a board that asked for a famous strategy logo, hire that logo. We can sit later in one department when the pack names a process.

The inheritor matters as much as the owner. If nobody internal will pair, Own fails on the last Friday. Name the inheritor before the first paid month. If you cannot name one, hire in-house first or buy the audit and wait. If a platform team already owns agents, we can build a skill they will maintain. The Tuesday operator remains a named person. Cyriac will say, as Nidrosoft and as The AI Architect, when the honest next step is a job posting instead of another month.

We will not take a brief that is only make us AI native with no department and no repo, a brief that forbids the unofficial stack, a brief that requires twenty named consultants, or a brief whose only metric is a press release. We will not take a process that happens once a year and call it an engineering seat. Annual planning can use NanoBrief-style speed for documents. It does not need a monthly chair. Protectron helps a team produce artifacts. Counsel still signs. We will not bless a promised homepage chatbot without an audit.

We will not pretend Cyriac can hold four serious workstreams at once. Write capacity into the plan. If waiting is unacceptable, hire shops for specified work and keep the studio on the unspecified process. We will not staff a communications-only transformation, a first deliverable that is only a homepage bot, or a process that forbids a human on customer send.

Procurement sheets that require a published monthly rate before anyone has seen the stack will fail here. Book the audit. If procurement cannot sign a United States studio, stop before the legal pack. We will mark up a forty-page RFP where it asks for a local registered office we do not have. San Diego is the studio. We do not invent a pin in your city.

We will take a messy intake queue, a dealer night shift, a notice file, a token invoice, a brief that takes three hours, a renewal calendar, a mix that needs notes, a ticket queue with a rotting eval sheet. Those are engineering problems because they are operations problems. They match the public archive.

Omnira Dental, Octana, Eviction Wizard, Guidera, TokenTra, Protectron, Nerlude, Nexuvo, NanoBrief, Clear Audio AI, MixGuidera. Those names are on this site because an engineering claim that cannot survive a click is decoration. Open them and see whether the texture matches the work you want done in your repo.

Numbers we can repeat: Nexuvo dealers acquire 3x more inventory with 80 percent less manual outreach. TokenTra teams cut 10 to 30 percent of wasted AI spend. NanoBrief writes a brief in under two minutes instead of three or more hours. One hundred twenty-five products shipped. Twelve-plus years of making software. We will not add an embed-specific return invented for this paragraph.

The AI Architect is the practice name. Nidrosoft is the studio. Cyriac Zeh is the person. If a proposal you received from someone else hides the person who will merge, ask for names before you compare us to them. Your embed will be named after your process, unless you license a product.

Use the public calendar or cyriac@nidrosoft.com. Name the department, the tool, the weekly pain, the owner, and who will inherit. Say if you think you need an embed, a build, training, or only a map. We will answer with a recommended first service or with a no. Pretty architecture diagrams that only a vendor understands fail the first hour.

Bring the unofficial path: the export, the night someone retypes a listing, the playground key that is still on production. An embed that only sees the official SOP will recommend a homepage chatbot. The hours are usually elsewhere. If you already have an in-house req or consultancy leftovers, send those files. We will say which leftover we also sell and which we will lose. If you only have budget for seats, say that in the first note. If a shop already owns a specified app, keep them and write a boundary before the first standup.

Scope sets commercial terms after we understand access and volume. That is why this page refuses a fake monthly price. Cyriac Zeh is in San Diego. The work ships wherever the systems run. We will travel when the floor requires it and that week is in the scope. Book the audit. The map decides whether the chair is the right buy.