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SAIL

Lab notebook · FAQ

Common questions.
Plain answers.

What SAIL is. How the lab engages. What it costs. Where we work. The questions that come up before every engagement, answered the way an engineer would answer them.

01

What is a Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE)?

A Forward Deployed Engineer is a senior software engineer who embeds directly with a customer organization to design, build, and ship critical systems in production. The role bridges traditional consulting and product engineering: the engineer is on the customer's keyboard, accountable for architecture through deployment. Palantir invented the term in the late 2000s; Anthropic, OpenAI, Anduril, and Google have all adopted the model since. SAIL applies it to healthcare and finance.

02

Does SAIL build agentic AI platforms?

Yes. Every engagement is AI-native by default. SAIL builds agentic platforms — capture-to-conclusion control planes, recursive grounding loops, generative interfaces, AI-assisted authoring — across clinical research operations, hospital and clinic workflows, payments, risk signal, and compliance. AI proposes; humans land it; every step is captured and replayable.

03

What sectors does SAIL work in?

Two: healthcare and finance. Both are regulated. Both reward systems that hold up under audit and at machine speed. Healthcare engagements include clinical data platforms for research operators, hospital and clinic operations (intake automation, eligibility verification, prior authorization, patient flow), and agentic clinical workflows. Finance engagements include payments rails, real-time risk and fraud signal, and agentic compliance. SAIL does not take engagements outside these two sectors.

04

What's the typical engagement timeline?

Architecture in two weeks. First production deploy in four. Hardened by twelve. A typical strike-team engagement runs three-week sprints against a prioritized backlog, with a demoable outcome each cycle. Larger platform engagements run on a continuous-delivery retainer with quarterly scaling. Six-month minimum on the initial commitment.

05

How does SAIL price engagements?

Two structures. A continuous-delivery retainer for ongoing platform work — a fixed monthly fee that covers a strike team of two or three FDEs. A fixed-fee SOW for a discrete, bounded build — typically tied to milestone-based deliverables. There are no per-hour PMs, no account managers, no creative directors. Every dollar is engineering.

06

What is DECSEA?

DECSEA stands for Deterministic Code Synthesis via Execution Analysis. It is the framework SAIL uses to keep AI-assisted code generation grounded: every generated module is run inside a verification environment, errors feed back instantly, and the agent regenerates against the failure. Pass or fail. No ambiguity. DECSEA is what lets a strike team move at AI speed without inheriting AI's nondeterminism.

07

How is SAIL different from a traditional consulting firm or agency?

Agencies optimize for billable hours. SAIL optimizes for shipped code. A typical agency spends months in discovery before the first line of code, layers PMs and account leads between the engineer and the customer, and leaves behind brittle systems that need a rewrite within a year. SAIL deploys senior engineers from week one, ships to production by week four, and hands off a zero-debt foundation by day thirty.

08

Where is SAIL based?

The lab is distributed across the United States, with engineers concentrated on the East and West Coasts and in Texas. Anchors include Boston/Cambridge, Los Angeles, and Austin. Engagements run forward-deployed, so the team works wherever the customer needs them — most weeks that's mixed remote with periodic in-person sprints at the customer's site.

09

What open-source projects does SAIL maintain?

Two, both MIT-licensed from the first commit. Helios is the JVM agentic runtime that powers SAIL's agents — secure, sandboxed, recursive. Sail is the native binary that provisions our bare-metal development environments declaratively from YAML. Both are public on GitHub at github.com/singlr-ai.

10

Is SAIL hiring?

The lab is not actively hiring at the moment. SAIL keeps a small, deliberately senior bench — every engineer is IC7 or above, on the keyboard every engagement, no exceptions. When a seat opens, candidates we already know reach the top of the queue. Engineers worth reaching can find the contact line on the careers page.

11

How do I reach the lab?

Every conversation starts with an engineer — no SDRs, no qualifying calls, no discovery decks. The contact page links to a calendar that books a session with a SAIL engineer. Bring the spec, the system, or the problem. If there's a fit, the next step is a scoping conversation; if not, you'll get a frank answer in the first thirty minutes.

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