FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
Partnership & Operations FAQ
Answering critical procurement, intellectual property, security compliance, and engineering operations questions regarding our technology alliances.
1. Contracting, Licensing & IP Rights
Yes, completely. Under Acadify’s standard Master Services Agreement (MSA) and Statement of Work (SOW) terms, all custom source code, configurations, data models, RAG pipelines, prompts, and documentations created or modified during the scope of our engagement are fully assigned to your company upon milestone payment. We do not retain any proprietary licenses or rights over your code.
We sign a mutual Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) before initiating scoping discussions, reviewing system diagrams, or accessing codebases. This ensures complete legal protection for your systems, proprietary customer data, and repository details from day zero.
We support two primary engagement structures tailored to project scopes:
- Fixed-Price Milestones: Ideal for defined MVP deliveries, specific integrations (e.g. Claude RAG setup), or isolated migrations. Payment is tied strictly to validated functional deliveries.
- Time & Materials Retainer: Ideal for long-term DevOps steering, continuous model evaluation, or staff scaling. We bill monthly based on engineering resources dedicated to your sprint cycles.
We design all systems to avoid vendor lock-in. During handover, we package complete system documentation, architecture diagrams, build handbooks, and runbooks. We conduct peer-programming transfer sessions to ensure your internal engineering team can comfortably manage and iterate on the code.
2. Security, Compliance & Data Isolation
Our engineers operate entirely within your organization's security perimeter. We do not copy code locally. We access code via secure remote systems (GitHub Enterprise), enforce branch protection rules, require multi-factor authentication (MFA) on all tools, and utilize static scanning (CodeQL/Secret Scanning) to detect security vulnerabilities before code is merged.
Yes. We apply SOC 2 Type II operational standards across our development environments. When architecting systems for healthcare or finance, we configure resources strictly within compliant cloud zones (HIPAA-eligible AWS Bedrock or Azure OpenAI), setup transport-layer security (TLS 1.3), ensure data encryption at rest (AES-256), and log execution telemetry.
Yes. By deploying models via cloud endpoints (like AWS Bedrock or Vertex AI) or enterprise developer API parameters, we enable Zero-Data Retention (ZDR). This ensures that your system prompts, contextual document inputs, and outputs are never stored, cached, or used by third-party model providers to train their engines.
3. Engineering Operations & Onboarding
We align our communications with **US Pacific Standard Time (PST)** for daily standups, backlog refinements, sprint reviews, and planning sessions. Our engineering delivery operates across a distributed team model, ensuring deep development focus during IST hours and providing round-the-clock implementation velocity.
We integrate directly into your toolset. We use Slack, Microsoft Teams, or Discord for developer chat, and Jira, Linear, or GitHub Projects to manage sprints and track development velocity.
* **Onboarding:** Once an agreement is executed, we can deploy a core engineering team within **1 to 2 weeks**. For highly specialized security, ML, or infrastructure engineers, we draw from our pre-vetted network to scale within 30 days.
* **Offboarding:** We require a standard 30-day notice period for retainer teams to ensure complete handover, documentation packaging, and transition scoping.
* **Offboarding:** We require a standard 30-day notice period for retainer teams to ensure complete handover, documentation packaging, and transition scoping.
For clients on our retainer support models, we establish explicit Service Level Agreements (SLAs). We dedicate engineering points-of-contact and configure Slack/incident alerts to guarantee response times under 2 hours for critical (P1) production blockages.