Scoped engagements.
Plain deliverables.
Seneca is a consulting firm, not a product. We price by engagement — a written scope, a typical length, and a list of what you keep at the end. Three tiers cover most of what we are hired for: a Discovery Sprint to read the stack, a Migration Project to rebuild it, and a Monthly Retainer for standing work.
Engagements span cloud-native platforms and on-prem data centres — managed cloud workloads and on-prem hardware, object stores, warehouses, and on-prem clusters chosen per workload. The shape of the work stays the same; the stack is yours.
- Walk the data — sources, transforms, downstream consumers.
- Read the brittle places — pipelines, models, governance gaps.
- Surface what is working, what is fragile, and what to change first.
- Written stack walkthrough your team keeps and references.
- A fragility audit mapped to the system we read.
- A prioritised change list with rough effort and risk notes.
AI and governance work can be scoped here as a focused audit — the system surfaces, the risk register, the verification gaps. The sprint frames the work that follows.
- Design a written blueprint before any line of code is written.
- Build the new system — pipelines, models, integrations, AI surfaces.
- Verify against the agreed contract — schemas, behaviour, performance.
- Hand off code, infra, runbooks, and verification artefacts.
- A blueprint you can scrutinise before build starts.
- Code, infrastructure, tests, and runbooks landed in your repos.
- Verification artefacts and an audit trail tied to the build.
- A written post-mortem and a hand-off your team can run from day one.
Where AI systems land in scope, this is where they ship — model integrations, retrieval layers, evaluation harnesses, and the policy rails around them. Data engineering foundation work stays the spine.
- An async-first standing window with code review and pairing on request.
- A prioritised backlog we maintain together — your business on top.
- Reactive triage when something breaks in the systems we built or own.
- Quarterly written reviews of the system and the roadmap ahead.
- A named engagement lead accountable from kickoff to hand-off.
- A code review window with written notes, not drive-by approvals.
- A maintained, prioritised backlog reviewed on a regular cadence.
- Quarterly written reviews your team tracks and budgets against.
Retainers are where AI-systems operations and governance mature over time — observation, evaluation drift, policy changes, new surfaces. Foundation keeps running while the surface area grows.
Tell us what is on fire —
we will write back.
If none of the three tiers is a clean fit, write anyway. We reply within one business day with a written read on whether we are the right team to take it.
AI-assisted, team-verified
One named engagement lead, end to end. When AI accelerates the build, our engineers review and stand behind every output — or it does not ship.
Written deliverables you keep
Every engagement produces documents, diagrams, and runbooks your team owns on day one. No internal-only decks, no locked-down tooling.
Scope set on the first call, scope held
We agree the scope and the length in writing before billing starts. If the work changes, we discuss it before we do it — not after.