Sapien Engineering

How we work

One process for every engineering engagement. You know what each step costs before it starts, and every document we produce is yours, whether or not you go on to the next step.

1 Meet

Write to hello@sapienengineering.com. We reply with questions and ask for anything you already have: a process document, a screenshot, the spreadsheet that runs the thing. If it is a fit, a first meeting in person, in Cleveland, free. We do some light discovery on our own time around it.

2 Discover

For a project with real scope, a paid discovery on a retainer sized to the project. We look at the operation. For automation: what to automate first and what it touches. For an AI rollout: who uses what, and what data it reaches. For software: the systems and the people around them. You get back the scope of work, what we found, the spec, and a firm project price. Whatever the discovery does not use of the retainer is credited to the build. The documents are yours whether you go ahead or not.

3 Build

A fixed price, set before the work starts. Design, code, deployment and handover, delivered end to end. For an AI rollout the build is the policy your staff can follow, the training, and the first automation that proves it.

4 Run

When it ships we offer to run it: hosting, operations, on-call, and extending it, on a monthly retainer. Or your own team takes it over with the documentation. Either way, the person who designed it is the one answering for it.

IT and infrastructure

The one line that does not need a discovery retainer. We look at the estate, then quote a monthly agreement for it: networks, cloud, telephony, identity, security, run on infrastructure we own and operate.

The writeup

Every engagement ends in an anonymized writeup like the ones under Work: the problem, the decision, the reasoning. Never your name, never anything that points at you. We agree to it before we start, and you approve it before it is published.

How we think

AI to leverage judgment, code to leverage mechanical work. Most of the industry has that backwards. Every decision defensible as the long-term-correct one, not just good enough to ship. Know how little a problem actually needs before reaching for how much you can build.