Forward-Deployed Engineering Chicago — We Deploy Into Your Business

Developers of Chicago provides forward-deployed engineering in Chicago. Embedded senior engineers work inside your team, shipping production code from day one. We do not just build, we deploy into your business. Our engineers join your standups, use your email, and row in the same direction as your team. There are no middleman project managers. You get direct Slack and GitHub access to the developers writing your code.

What is Forward Deployment?

Forward deployment is an elite dev unit integrated directly into your operations. Our engineers join your standups, use your email, and row in the same direction as your team. You get direct access with no middleman project managers, and we ship features weekly on a continuous delivery cadence, not at the end of a 6-month waterfall.

• On-site or Remote Embed — Our engineers join your standups, use your email, and row in the same direction as your team.
• Direct Access — No middleman project managers. Direct Slack and GitHub access to the devs writing your code.
• Weekly Cadence — Continuous delivery. We ship features weekly, not at the end of a 6-month waterfall.

Who Needs Forward Deployment?

• Startups Post-Funding — You just raised, and you need to hit milestones fast before burning cash on hiring experiments.
• Scaleups — Your internal team is drowning in tech debt and bug fixes. You need surge capacity.
• Enterprises — Stuck with legacy systems. You need a fast, agile strike team to modernize your infrastructure.

How Forward Deployment Works

A structured, repeatable process for embedding senior engineers into your team.

1. Assessment — We start with a deep audit of your codebase, infrastructure, and team workflows to understand where you are today and where you need to be. This includes reviewing your architecture, identifying technical debt, and mapping out the highest-impact opportunities for an embedded engineer.
2. Onboarding — Our engineers are integrated into your Slack, GitHub, Jira, and daily standups so they operate as a seamless extension of your team. We align on coding standards, review processes, and communication norms within the first few days to minimize ramp-up friction.
3. Integration — We wire into your CI/CD pipelines, staging environments, and monitoring tools to ensure every change we ship is safe, observable, and reversible. This step guarantees that our contributions meet your production standards from the very first pull request.
4. Sprint Cycles — We work in weekly sprint cycles alongside your product managers and designers, turning roadmap items into shipped features on a predictable cadence. Each cycle ends with a demo, retrospective, and a clear plan for the next iteration.
5. Delivery — Production-ready code is merged continuously, with documentation, tests, and observability built in so your team can maintain and extend everything we ship. We never leave behind a black box. Every deliverable is handed off with full context and ownership.

When to Choose Forward Deployment

• Team Scaling — Your hiring pipeline is slow and you need senior engineering capacity now, not in six months.
• Technical Leadership — Your team is talented but lacks a senior architect to set direction, establish best practices, and mentor junior developers.
• Legacy Modernization — You are sitting on years of technical debt and monolithic code that slows every new feature.
• Product Launches — You have a hard launch deadline and your current team is at capacity. A forward-deployed engineer adds the surge bandwidth needed to hit your date.
• Architecture Review — You are unsure whether your current architecture will scale to the next order of magnitude.
• DevOps Setup — You lack mature CI/CD, automated testing, or observability and it is slowing down your delivery.

Technologies Our Engineers Work With

A modern, battle-tested stack we are fluent in from day one: React, Node.js, Python, Go, AWS, Kubernetes, PostgreSQL, and GraphQL.

Pricing

Retainers starting at $2,000 per month. Engagements are structured as monthly retainers, and you can adjust the number of engineers up or down with 30 days notice.

Frequently Asked Questions

How quickly can an engineer be embedded into my team?

In most cases we can have a senior engineer onboarded and writing code within one to two weeks. The assessment phase typically takes a few days, after which we integrate directly into your Slack, GitHub, and project management tools so the engineer is productive from day one.

Do the engineers work on-site or remotely?

Both. Our engineers are based in Chicago and can work on-site at your office for key collaboration days, or operate fully remotely. We adapt to whatever workflow your team already uses, including hybrid arrangements that balance in-person collaboration with focused remote work.

What if the embedded engineer does not fit our team culture?

We take culture fit seriously during the assessment phase and will reassign engineers if the match is not right. Because we operate as a team rather than a single contractor, we have the bench depth to swap in a better-suited engineer without losing momentum on your project.

Who owns the code that the engineer writes?

You do. All intellectual property, source code, and documentation produced during the engagement belongs entirely to your company. We transfer full ownership on delivery and ensure your internal team has the context needed to maintain and extend everything we build.

Can we scale up or down the number of embedded engineers?

Yes. Engagements are structured as monthly retainers, and you can adjust the number of engineers up or down with 30 days notice. This flexibility is one of the core advantages of forward deployment over traditional hiring, which locks you into long commitments.