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01 / Engagement

Architecture review.

RateFrom $1,200

When one decision is too important to get wrong.

The brief

Most senior architecture decisions in AI get made by people who have never put a comparable system into production. A vendor's solutions architect. A consultant who has read the documentation. A senior engineer who has built one prototype and one production system. That is not enough.

An architecture review brings someone who has shipped this exact class of system before, looks at what you are proposing or what you have already built, and tells you what they would change. In writing. With named risks tied to specific layers of the stack.

Fit

When this fits

  • A vendor pitched an architecture and you want a second read before you sign.
  • Someone on your team built a prototype and you are trying to decide whether to ship it.
  • You suspect a system is drifting on cost, latency, or quality, and you cannot prove it.
  • An RFC, design doc, or proposal is on your desk and the decision is hard to reverse.
  • A board or audit committee has asked you to validate an AI design choice.

When it does not

  • There is no specific artifact yet. Start with the discovery phase of a project build.
  • You need someone embedded in the work over time. See engineering leadership.
  • You want an opinion, not a review. We will not price an engagement without something to evaluate.
What happens
  1. Step 01

    Scope call

    A 30-minute call to confirm what is being reviewed, what you are optimizing for, and what good looks like. If the scope cannot be defined, we say so and we do not take the engagement.

  2. Step 02

    Review

    Three to five business days reading the artifact: code, traces, evals, vendor docs, RFCs, architecture diagrams. We follow up in writing where we need more.

  3. Step 03

    Written assessment

    A document with what we would keep, what we would change, what we would watch for, and the specific stack layer each finding lives in. Specific. Ranked by risk.

  4. Step 04

    Optional walkthrough

    A 60-minute call with your team to walk the assessment, answer questions, and resolve disagreements. Included on request.

What you walk away with
Who runs it
Pricing

From $1,200 for a single-artifact review. Scoped per engagement. Multi-component reviews and quarterly check-ins are quoted on request.

Read further
Bring us in

Tell us what you are looking at. We will tell you whether this is the right engagement, a different one, or none of them.

Direct line.

info@swenor.us
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