Ship your roadmap
on a spec you signed.
Senior engineers in your time zone and a North American PM who writes the spec with you. Working software every Friday — and if a milestone slips, that's on us.
Pods. Embedded. Placements.
Three shapes, one senior bench, one system.
Signed specs. Friday demos. Your repo.
A week with a pod looks like this.
Friday demos, weekly.
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Working software every Friday, retro Monday, six hours of daily overlap in between. The cadence is the contract.
Built-in guardrails.
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Signed scope, metered AI, and an exit you never have to negotiate.
One focused queue.
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Demos, approvals, and reviews land in your Slack — not a portal you'll never open.
Founders
with a goal
Bring the goal; we sign the spec and demo every Friday until it ships.
See the rungsTeams
hiring seats
Named shortlist in 72 hours — embedded this sprint, or a hire for keeps.
Explore hiringThree rungs. One flat number each.
Exact rate in your proposal. No setup, recruiter, or bench fees — and a thirty-day exit on every rung.
Embedded Engineers
You run the board; you need senior capacity. Engineers join your stand-ups this sprint, with the whole system behind them.
What's included
- 1–3 engineers in your sprints
- Mentorship + staff-level review
- Free seat swap, first 2 weeks
- Perm conversion path
Pod
FlagshipYou bring a goal; we write the spec together and demo every Friday until it ships. One team accountable to a document you signed.
What's included
- 2–3 engineers + 1 NA PM
- Spec with acceptance criteria
- Friday demos, weekly
- Milestone slips are on us
Pod+
A larger dedicated pod that owns a product area quarter over quarter — same PM, same faces, roadmaps instead of single milestones.
What's included
- Larger dedicated pod
- Quarterly roadmaps
- Same PM, same faces
- Priority staffing
What we actually sign — and what's always included+
The spec defines the milestone and its acceptance criteria. The subscription funds the team. And if a milestone slips, we keep working it at no additional charge until it lands.
That resolves the fixed-scope-versus-subscription question before you ask it: scope certainty on the milestone, staffing certainty on the team, and the slip risk is ours. And four approval gates — ticket, spec, code, behavior — mean AI drafts and checks, people approve, and nothing merges on its own.
Flat monthly
One subscription per team, published in your proposal. The rate you see is the rate the engineers know.
Everything included
PM, mentorship, staff-level review, and our AI delivery pipeline — with every AI call metered, so you can see what each shipped ticket cost.
Leave any time
Thirty-day exit on every rung, no questions. We earn next month with last Friday's demo.
Who's shipping
with Sunshift
UAT-ready four weeks before go-live.
A Sunshift pod running our AI-assisted, spec-driven pipeline for an enterprise client (AMA). Code complete week 14 of 16, all UAT feedback resolved, deadlines met — every one.
Read the quote
“A 100% fill rate for the roles we have engaged them on. One of the most impressive things was when they filled a role that we were working on for three months in one week — and we've engaged them primarily on difficult-to-fill positions.”
Read the quote
“The best recruitment agency we have partnered with. When we engaged them, we were using five different agency partners — now they are our go-to. They're not concerned with earning another buck — they're truly committed to the success of your organization.”
Questions you'd ask a founder.
If something's missing, mail juan.valdes@sunshift.dev — we answer in your working hours.
What happens if an engineer quits mid-engagement?+
The pod absorbs it. The floating staff engineer steps in on review while we backfill from the vetted bench — the same three-gate vetting, not a scramble. Your PM, board, and spec don't change, and the knowledge lives in your repo and the pod, not in one head.
Who owns the IP and the repo?+
You do, from the first commit. Work happens in your repo under your access controls, and IP assignment is written into the MSA before the spec sessions start. When we leave, nothing walks out the door — there's nothing of yours on our side to walk.
What if the spec turns out to be wrong halfway through?+
Specs change — in writing. Your PM re-scopes the milestone with you, the acceptance criteria get updated, and you sign off again. The subscription doesn't move; the document does. What we won't do is quietly drift from a spec nobody is maintaining.
How is this different from staff augmentation? From an agency?+
Staff augmentation rents you capacity and leaves the outcome on your desk — that's our Embedded rung, and we're honest that it's the right shape when you own the roadmap. An agency takes the outcome but hides the people and marks up the rate. A pod is the third thing: named engineers, an accountable NA PM, a signed spec, and one flat number.
How do you actually use AI?+
A six-step pipeline: conversation → ticket → spec → code → tests → review. A PO assistant turns requests into dev-ready tickets in your Slack; specs are approved before build; critical paths get Playwright tests; PRs get an AI first pass before a human. People approve at four checkpoints, and every AI call is metered — you can see cost per ticket.
What does week one actually look like, day by day?+
Monday: kickoff, access, and introductions — you meet every name. Tuesday and Wednesday: two spec sessions with your PM and ours; goal, acceptance criteria, out-of-scope list. Thursday: spec signed, board seeded, pod standup begins. Friday: first demo — usually a walking skeleton in your repo, so the pipeline is proven before the real milestone starts.
What if we want to hire the engineer permanently?+
Ask us — it happens, and we'd rather celebrate it than fight it. Conversion terms are in the MSA up front, no poaching drama, and our permanent-placement practice can run the paperwork. Every perm hire carries a 90-day guarantee.
How do you handle security, NDAs, and contractor compliance?+
NDA before we see anything; MSA with IP assignment before the spec. Engineers access your systems through accounts you provision and can revoke, with least-privilege as the default. Every engineer is under a contractor agreement with confidentiality and IP terms that mirror yours, and we invoice from our Canadian entity in CAD or USD.
Stop managing bodies.
Buy an outcome.
Twenty minutes, zero slides. We'll tell you which shape fits — a pod, an embedded engineer, or a hire.