Solid Hunch embeds experienced engineers alongside your teams to understand the problem, build the solution and deploy it where the work actually happens.
We work on the operational problems that sit between "the business knows it's broken" and "nobody has shipped the fix".
Critical processes held together by spreadsheets, email threads and manual handoffs — fragile, slow and impossible to scale.
Data dispersed across systems that don't communicate, so every answer requires exporting, reconciling and re-typing.
Critical operational decisions made on instinct and week-old reports because integrated, live information doesn't exist.
AI initiatives that impressed in the demo but never made the jump from prototype to production use.
Enterprise software that exists — and was paid for — but isn't used by the people it was built for.
Internal teams that know exactly what needs to change, but have no spare capacity to deliver an urgent transformation.
If any of these sound familiar, we should talk — this is precisely the work we deploy against.
Hard operational problems won't be solved from the outside. Our engineers work inside the problem — alongside your people, data and systems.
We work with your operators, managers and technical teams — where the work actually happens, not in a meeting room.
We map the workflow, the data and the real blocker — which is rarely the one written in the original brief.
We build and integrate a first usable solution, connected to your existing systems, and put it in production fast.
We evolve the solution, or transfer the capability to your internal team — with the knowledge to own it.
You don't receive a report and a backlog. You receive working software in production.
Forward Deployed Engineering shouldn't be a leap of faith. Each engagement has a clear scope, commitment and outcome.
A short, intense engagement on one operational problem: we work with the actual users, study the workflow and data, and leave you with a concrete path to production.
A small senior team integrated with yours, responsible end-to-end — from discovery through to software running in production and adopted by its users.
Once the solution proves itself, we industrialise it — and make sure your team can own it without us.
We don't sell engineers by the day. We deploy a senior engineering team against a critical operational problem — with responsibility for what ships. Depending on the problem, the team combines a lead Forward Deployed Engineer with software and data engineers, a technical product lead, and sector specialists.
Representative engagements that show how the model plays out in practice.
Embedded with the operations team, we mapped the daily planning workflow, integrated three data sources that had never been connected, and delivered the first production workflow in eight weeks — used by the planners themselves from day one.
A document-heavy back office had a promising AI prototype that hadn't shipped in nine months. We rebuilt it around the actual workflow, integrated it with the systems the team already used, and put it into production in six weeks.
ERP, planning and field data lived in separate systems with no shared view. We built an integrated operational layer with live dashboards and alerting, so decisions moved from week-old reports to same-day data.
// These stories are representative examples of how we deploy — not named client references. Anonymised client cases are available in conversation.
"The only real valuable thing is intuition."— Albert Einstein
Everyone has access to the same data and the same decision frameworks. The opportunities worth pursuing are first spotted by intuition — by people close enough to the operation to feel where it's broken.
Intuition identifies the opportunity; engineering turns it into operational impact. We validate every hunch the only way that counts — with software running in production, measured by adoption and results.
Solid Hunch is a Lisbon-based engineering firm specialised in Forward Deployed Engineering: putting experienced engineers inside complex operational problems and taking responsibility for building and shipping the solution.
We work in small senior teams, close to the people who do the work. We integrate with the systems and data you already have, and we measure ourselves on what reaches production and gets used — not on slideware.
If your hardest operational problem has resisted reports, backlogs and off-the-shelf software, it's probably a deployment problem. That's our specialty.
In the first conversation, we'll determine whether it is suitable for a forward-deployed engagement — and if it isn't, we'll tell you.
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Rua D. João V, 23, 1.03 · 1250-091 Lisboa, Portugal
Solid Hunch