We don't keep our senior agentic engineers at headquarters. We send them into your building to build and run AI agents on your data and your systems — an agentic SOC, agentic GRC, agentic AI ops. Not a slide deck. Not an outsourced ticket queue. Working agents in weeks, and every line of it stays in your repos.
Most AI and security initiatives don't fail on technology. They fail on integration — nobody sits inside the environment long enough to make it work. Consultants write it down. Tools show you the gaps. Outsourcers run it in their stack. Nobody closes the loop in your building.
You paid for a gap assessment. It named 84 findings and shipped zero fixes. A year later the binder is still on the shelf and the auditor is still asking the same questions.
Vanta or Drata told you what's red. It can't write the IAM policy, wire the log pipeline, or decide which risks to accept. Dashboards don't drive themselves.
The demo was great. Then it met your real data, your real permissions, and the three teams who'd have to change how they work. Nobody owned the integration, so it stalled. That wasn't a model problem — it was a nobody-in-the-building problem.
The MSSP runs it in their portal, on their playbooks, under their accounts. Cancel the contract and the detections, the automation, the evidence all walk out the door. You paid for years and never owned a line of it.
A Forward Deployed Engineer is an agentic engineer who becomes your technical team for a fixed engagement — building AI agents directly on your data and systems, in your cloud, your repos, your accounts, with a human with judgment behind every one. When they roll off, the agents keep running and everything they built is yours.
Agents triage every alert, enrich it with threat intel and asset context, correlate across your SIEM, EDR, and cloud logs, build the incident timeline, and execute the playbooks you've approved. Humans get the decisions, not the noise.
Agents map every control to its framework, collect evidence continuously, draft and version policies, pre-answer vendor questionnaires, and flag drift the day it happens. Your compliance platform finally goes green and stays green.
Agents watch infrastructure and the AI systems you run, execute runbooks, handle access requests and reviews, catch config drift and cost anomalies — and put guardrails, evals, and audit trails around the models your own teams are shipping.
Your FDE gets a seat in your engineering org for the length of the deployment. Access provisioned week one. Standups attended. PRs opened. The hard part of shipping agents was never the model — it's mapping how your org actually runs, which teams have to change, and which data people trust. You can't do that from headquarters, so we don't try.
The split that makes a single senior engineer as productive as a small team — and keeps a human accountable for every action an agent takes.
Every engagement is scoped to a finish line — "SOC 2 Type I ready," "CMMC L2 gaps closed" — and the FDE owns the ticket to done. No hourly meter.
The deliverable is software in production: agents triaging, evidence collecting itself, policies enforced, detections firing. Things an auditor — or a 2am incident — can test.
Every policy, pipeline, detection rule, and runbook is committed to your repos under your accounts. No proprietary platform, no vendor portal, nothing that leaves when we do. The program keeps running — and we're a call away if it doesn't.
Forward-deployed engagements have a shape, and the teams that pioneered the model all use the same one: a short sprint that proves it, a fixed-scope deployment that finishes it, and a hard end date. So do we.
One engineer, in your Slack and your cloud, for five working days. You get one or two controls live in production — MFA enforced, logging centralized — and a scoped plan for everything else. The lowest-risk way to see the model work.
“SOC 2 Type I ready.” “CMMC Level 2 gaps closed.” The engineer is embedded three to four days a week; agents run around the clock. Fixed scope, fixed price, and a finish line an auditor can test against.
Multi-framework programs, a second audit, or a security function built from zero. Renewed one 90-day cycle at a time — never open-ended. At twelve months we help you hire; past that, an embedded engineer is staff augmentation with a better name.
| Full-time hire | Consultant | Outsourced / MSSP | Compliance tool | FDE for Agentic Systems | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Who does the work | Them — if you can hire one | You, from their recommendations | Their team, in their stack | You, from their dashboard | Embedded engineer + AI agents |
| Who owns what gets built | You | Their methodology, your PDF | Them — cancel and it's gone | The vendor's platform | You — it's in your repos |
| First control in production | 3–6 months (hiring + ramp) | Not their deliverable | Weeks — in their portal | Not their deliverable | Week 1 |
| Time to audit-ready | 6–12 months | 6–12 months | Varies — they run it, you don't | Often never — no driver | 6–12 weeks |
| Works inside your tools | ✓ | ✗ Docs & decks | ✗ Their accounts, their portal | Read-only integrations | ✓ Your cloud, repos, Slack |
| What's left behind | A person you must retain | A PDF | A dependency | A subscription | Running agents, controls, evidence — yours |
| When it ends | When they quit | When the SOW ends | Never — that's the model | When you stop paying | Fixed date, 12-month cap |
| Annual cost | $250K–$400K | $150K–$300K | Recurring, indefinite | $10K–$50K + your time | Scoped per engagement → |
Houston-based, deployed anywhere. Most of our clients aren't tech companies — they're the operators, builders, and specialists whose security question comes from a regulator, an insurer, or a 200-page vendor packet. 20–500 employees.
We were losing enterprise deals because we couldn't answer their security questionnaires. BluAgent got us SOC 2 ready in 10 weeks and we closed $1.2M in new ARR within the next quarter.
Our insurance premiums dropped 30% after BluAgent implemented a real governance program. The ROI paid for the service three times over in the first year.
I was spending 30% of my time on security questionnaires instead of building product. BluAgent gave me my week back and our responses are actually accurate now.
Client names withheld under NDA. References available on a scoping call.
An agentic engineer — a senior engineer who builds and operates AI agents — who embeds in your company for a fixed-scope engagement and is measured on what ships. They sit in your standups, work in your cloud and repos, open PRs, and own the outcome end to end: an agentic SOC that triages for you, an agentic GRC function that keeps you audit-ready, agentic AI ops that keeps the lights on. The agents handle the repetitive work; the engineer is accountable for every decision they make. The role exists because the hard part of putting AI into production is integration and org reality, not the model — and you can't solve that from a vendor's headquarters.
A consultant assesses and recommends; you do the implementing, and the IP you paid for is a document. A vCISO sets strategy and attends board meetings; someone else still has to build. A Forward Deployed Engineer for Agentic Systems builds — in your environment, so what they build is yours. If your bottleneck is decisions, a fractional CISO is right, and we offer that alongside a deployment. If your bottleneck is that nothing gets done, you need an FDE.
No, and the difference is ownership. An outsourcer or MSSP does the work in their environment — their SIEM, their playbooks, their accounts — and you rent the result for as long as you keep paying. A Forward Deployed Engineer for Agentic Systems does the work in yours. Every policy, pipeline, detection rule, and runbook is committed to your repos under your accounts. When the engagement ends you keep all of it, and it keeps running without us. That's also why every engagement has a hard end date: an embedded engineer with no exit is just outsourcing again.
Enforce MFA and SSO. Roll out least-privilege IAM. Wire logs into a SIEM and write detection rules. Put vulnerability scanning in CI. Publish and get sign-off on policies. Stand up access reviews and vendor reviews. Map every control to evidence that collects itself. Then walk your team through a mock audit and hand over the runbooks.
Scoped, time-boxed, and logged — the same way you'd onboard a contractor engineer. We start with read access for inventory and escalate per-system with your approval. Every change goes through your normal PR and change-management flow. When the engagement ends, access is revoked and you keep an audit trail of everything that was touched.
Agents draft policies, map controls to frameworks, collect and organize evidence, pre-answer security questionnaires, and watch for configuration drift. They do not make risk decisions, merge code, or talk to your auditor. A human engineer reviews and owns every output before it counts.
SOC 2, HIPAA, HITRUST, CMMC 2.0, NIST 800-171, NIST CSF, ISO 27001, PCI-DSS, GDPR, and NYDFS 500. We work alongside Vanta, Drata, and similar platforms — the FDE is usually what turns them from 40% to green.
Three formats. A 5-day sprint that ships your first controls and scopes the rest. A 6–12 week deployment — the most common — that owns one outcome end to end, fixed scope and fixed price. And 90-day extension cycles for multi-framework programs, capped at twelve months: that's the point where an embedded engineer has become a staffing gap, and where we help you hire instead. Every format is priced against the outcome rather than by the hour, and lands 70–80% below the fully-loaded cost of a full-time senior security hire. We'll give you a number after a 30-minute scoping call.
Usually you'll want one for continuous monitoring after handoff, and if you already have one we'll drive it. But the platform isn't the work — the controls are. Plenty of our clients arrive with a tool that's been sitting at 40% for a year.
A short call with a security engineer — not a sales rep. You'll leave with a clear read on what a deployment would cover, how long it takes, and what it costs.
A BluAgent security engineer will reach out within one business day to set up your scoping call.