Civilized

Services

Two tracks.
One studio.

Most engagements draw from both tracks. We're not a pure AI shop or a pure dev shop — we're the team that builds the AI and the product it lives inside.

Track A

AI & Agentic Systems

We build production-grade AI — the kind that has evals, observability, and a cost model before it ships. Not demos. Not prototypes. Agents that work in the real world.

AI Strategy & Discovery

A structured engagement to map where AI actually creates leverage in your product or workflow. We come back with a prioritized roadmap, a build-vs-buy recommendation, and ROI math based on your actual unit economics — not industry benchmarks.

2–3 week engagement · Starting at $15K

Good fit if...

You're not sure where to start with AI and want a senior opinion, not a vendor pitch

You've seen demos but need to know what's actually worth building

Your board or investors are asking about AI strategy and you need a credible answer

Deliverables

Opportunity mapping: where AI creates defensible leverage in your stack

Build vs. buy analysis with vendor landscape

ROI model with best/base/conservative cases

Prioritized 6-month AI roadmap

Kickoff call with your team to walk through findings

Agent Design & Build

Production agents and copilots, integrated into your existing stack. We design the agentic architecture, build the agent, wire up the tooling, and ship with evals and observability from day one.

4–12 week engagements · From $25K

Good fit if...

You have a workflow that's mostly manual and clearly automatable

You want to build a copilot or AI feature inside an existing product

You need multi-agent orchestration and don't want to learn it from a blog post

Deliverables

Agent architecture document with tool call design and failure modes

Production agent with eval harness

Observability dashboard (latency, cost, quality metrics)

Integration with your existing codebase

Runbook and handoff documentation

ML Infrastructure & Self-Hosted Inference

vLLM, RunPod, together with a cost model that makes the economics work for your stage. We stand up the serving infrastructure, optimize the GPU economics, and build the ops layer that keeps it running.

3–8 week engagements · From $20K

Good fit if...

Your API costs are threatening your unit economics

You need data privacy or behavioral control that hosted APIs can't provide

You want to fine-tune a model and need the infra to do it repeatably

Deliverables

Serving stack setup (vLLM or equivalent) on your cloud of choice

Cost model with spend projections at 10x, 100x traffic

LoRA fine-tuning pipeline if needed

Monitoring: token cost, latency p95/p99, error rates

Runbook for on-call and capacity planning

Automation Engineering

Workflow automation that connects your systems, eliminates manual handoffs, and actually runs in production. Built with the same rigor as product code — not Zapier hacks.

2–6 week engagements · From $12K

Good fit if...

You have repetitive workflows eating senior engineer time

You're stitching together 4+ tools that don't talk to each other

You want automation that has observability, error handling, and doesn't break silently

Deliverables

Workflow mapping and automation architecture

Production automation with error handling and retry logic

Monitoring and alerting for automation failures

Documentation and handoff

AI Evals & Observability

You can't improve what you can't measure. We build the evaluation harness and observability layer that tells you whether your AI is actually doing what you think it's doing.

2–4 week engagements · From $10K

Good fit if...

You've shipped an AI feature and don't have a way to measure quality regression

You're about to fine-tune a model and need a baseline

Your AI is production-live but you have no visibility into failure modes

Deliverables

Eval harness for your specific use case (persona consistency, task completion, refusal behavior)

Cost and latency observability dashboard

Quality regression detection in CI

Benchmark dataset and scoring methodology

Track B

Product Engineering

We build the product the AI lives inside — or stands alone in. Web, mobile, backend, infra. Zero-to-one launches and platforms that scale to millions.

0-to-1 Product Builds

Full-stack product engineering from concept to launch. We work as a founding engineering team: product decisions, architecture, design system, and shipping. No juniors, no handoffs to offshore.

8–20 week engagements · From $50K

Good fit if...

You have a vision and funding but no engineering team yet

You need to validate a product idea in market without hiring a full-time team

You've been burned by an agency that shipped something you can't maintain

Deliverables

Product brief and architecture document

Design system and component library

Fully functional production application

CI/CD, monitoring, and deployment infrastructure

Handoff documentation and onboarding for your future engineering hires

Mobile (iOS, Android, React Native)

React Native mobile apps built to production quality. We build for real devices, real performance budgets, and real edge cases. App Store and Google Play submissions included.

8–16 week engagements · From $40K

Good fit if...

You need a mobile app and want one codebase, not two teams

You have a web product and need a native mobile companion

Your existing mobile app needs a performance or UX overhaul

Deliverables

React Native app with shared codebase for iOS and Android

App Store and Google Play submission and approval

Push notifications, deep linking, and analytics instrumentation

Performance testing on real device matrix

Web Applications & Platforms

Next.js web applications built for performance, SEO, and maintainability. From marketing sites to complex internal tools.

4–12 week engagements · From $20K

Good fit if...

You need a web product that's fast, accessible, and SEO-ready from day one

You're building an internal tool or admin surface that needs to be usable

Your current web app is slow and you need someone to fix it rather than explain why

Deliverables

Next.js application with full TypeScript

95+ Lighthouse scores on performance, accessibility, and SEO

CMS integration if needed

Deployment to Vercel, AWS, or your infra of choice

Backend & Infrastructure

API design, database architecture, and infrastructure that doesn't melt under load. We build backends that are boring in the best way — reliable, observable, maintainable.

4–10 week engagements · From $25K

Good fit if...

Your API is a bottleneck and you need someone to fix it, not document it

You're scaling past what your current infrastructure can handle

You need a data model redesign before you can ship the next feature

Deliverables

API architecture and implementation

Database schema design and migration plan

Infrastructure as code (Terraform or CDK)

Observability: logs, metrics, traces, alerts

Technical Due Diligence & Audits

An honest technical assessment before you write the check. We look at the code, the architecture, the team, and the roadmap — and tell you what's real.

1–2 week engagements · From $12K

Good fit if...

You're acquiring a company and need to know what's under the hood

You're investing and want a credible technical opinion

Your new CTO wants to know what they're inheriting

Deliverables

Architecture review and risk assessment

Code quality and security audit

Team assessment and key-person dependency analysis

Technical debt quantification

Remediation roadmap with priority and effort estimates

Track C

Leadership

Drop-in senior leadership for companies between rounds, between hires, or in the middle of something hard.

Fractional CTO

Senior technical leadership without the full-time commitment. We work as your CTO: engineering strategy, team structure, hiring decisions, board-level communication, and the technical judgment your business needs to make the right calls.

Ongoing monthly retainer · From $8K/month

Good fit if...

You're between pre-seed and Series A and not ready for a full-time CTO hire

Your founding engineer is excellent at code but needs a senior partner on strategy

You're scaling the engineering team and need someone who's done it before

Deliverables

Weekly or biweekly strategic sync with exec team

Engineering roadmap and prioritization framework

Hiring plan and interview process design

On-call for high-stakes architectural decisions

Board and investor-level technical communication

Engineering Org Design

The structures that make engineering teams work: team topology, career ladders, sprint process, on-call rotations, and the rituals that separate high-performing orgs from ones that just have a lot of meetings.

4–8 week engagements · From $20K

Good fit if...

You're scaling from 5 to 20+ engineers and need structure before you need bureaucracy

Your current process isn't working and you're not sure why

You've acquired an engineering team and need to integrate it

Deliverables

Team topology recommendation with rationale

Engineering career ladder

Sprint and delivery process design

On-call and incident response framework

Documentation culture and runbook templates

Not sure where to start?

Tell us what you're trying to build. We'll tell you which track fits.

Start a project