SQUARE ONE FOUNDRY
Engineering capacity, structured two ways.
You are not buying hours. You are buying a team that owns an outcome — either the whole technical roadmap, or one milestone standing between you and your next raise. How that team is structured, staffed and reported is the decision below.
Take a milestone off the roadmap, or take the roadmap.
Fractional engineering team
We embed alongside the founders and take ownership of technical development end to end — architecture, build, vendor selection, and the hundred decisions in between that nobody writes into a statement of work.
You have funding and a roadmap but no engineering organization yet, and building one would cost you a year you do not have. Or your technical founder is stretched across four disciplines and is the bottleneck on all of them.
Milestone-based project
One scoped deliverable with a defined end: a feasibility answer, a working prototype, a subsystem integrated, an MVP shipped. Fixed scope, fixed deliverable, and a clear definition of done agreed before we start.
One technical unknown is blocking your raise, your pilot, or your next board meeting — and you need it resolved without adding permanent headcount to do it.
Four steps, and you can stop after any of them.
The first two cost you nothing and produce something you can use whether or not you hire us.
You describe what you are building and what is in the way. We tell you which stage you are actually in — including when it is earlier than you hoped — and whether we are the right team for it. If we are not, we say so on this call rather than three weeks into a proposal.
We go deep enough to write a scope that survives contact with the work: what the real unknowns are, which disciplines the problem touches, what has to be answered first, and what it plausibly costs. This is engineering judgement, not a sales document.
Work runs in two-week increments against the milestone plan. You get a written update every increment — what moved, what did not, what we learned, what changed. Bad news arrives early, when it is still cheap to act on.
Design files, source, test data, bill of materials and documentation transfer to you as each milestone completes — not at the end of the relationship. If you hire an internal team midway, they inherit something they can actually work from.
The practical answers, before you have to ask for them.
Every design, file, schematic and line of code produced for your program is yours. We retain no rights, no license-back, and no claim on derivative work. Our own pre-existing tools and methods stay ours, and they are named explicitly in the agreement so there is never a question later.
Client work is confidential by default — no names, no logos, no case studies without written permission, which is why the projects on this site are unattributed. We discuss approaches and failure modes at the domain level and nothing that could identify a client or their technology.
A written update each increment covering progress, blockers, what we learned and any change to the plan, plus a standing call at whatever frequency suits you. No status theatre, no dashboards nobody reads — and never a surprise at the end of a quarter.
There is no account manager between you and the build. You talk to the people writing the firmware and cutting the enclosures, and one of the founders stays on every engagement for its full duration. It is the same team from the first call to handover.
The model is one decision. The stage is the other.
Whether you need a feasibility answer or a manufacturing package changes what the work is — and what it costs.