Joining the associate pool, answered in full.

In practice, by having delivered alongside James Rooney already, or by being referred by somebody who has. Tenhaw does not go to market for people after a client signs a Statement of Work, because that is the practice that makes a small supplier risky, and it is the reason the people on an engagement are not substituted without the client's written agreement. If we have not worked together, an application is a weaker signal than a piece of work in common, so make the work the introduction. There is no application form, no take-home exercise and no panel. If you want to start the conversation anyway, email us and expect it to be longer and more sceptical than it would be for someone we have delivered with.

BS7858-standard screening covering identity, right to work, employment history and criminal record checks, completed before any client access, with the same standard applied to associates and employees alike. It is evidenced during the client's supplier onboarding. Alongside it, associates are contracted to the same confidentiality, data-handling and no-sub-contracting obligations as an employee, confidentiality survives the end of the engagement indefinitely, and access to a client estate is granted against the principle of least privilege and time-boxed, with a documented offboarding step on exit.

Small, senior and visible. Delivery teams are two or three senior people, and you are not substituted without the client's written agreement. The cadence is a monthly production increment the team commits to and reports against, and a month with nothing in production is reported as a failed month rather than explained away. The build method is AI-engineering-first: requirements become structured markdown, a model interrogates the whole corpus for gaps and contradictions before any code is written, and the build runs against the full requirement set with a security review roughly every fifth prompt, pair-programmed with the client's own engineers throughout. Partner oversight is on every engagement and the escalation route is a person.

Associates are engaged for specific client work rather than employed, and there is no bench. That is the trade in both directions: a client is not paying for utilisation between engagements, and we cannot promise an associate a pipeline. Joining the pool is not an offer and does not come with a start date. If you need continuity of income, this is the wrong arrangement.

Six things, and only one of them is a technology. That you ship, with something a person can look at and a story about what broke. That you can build with AI as the primary tool, not as autocomplete, because our published method treats the requirements as the source code and the model as the compiler. That you will pair with the client's engineers, since a proof of concept nobody internal can reproduce is a demonstration rather than a capability. That you will recommend against a release when it is not ready, which we have done at least once on every engagement we have run. That you find the constraints of a regulated estate interesting. And that you will tell a client exactly where the evidence stands: working proofs of concept built in regulated estates, with productionisation in progress.

No, and we tell clients the same thing. No names, no published CVs and no headcount for the pool. The model supplies senior people for each engagement rather than a salaried bench, so no utilisation gap is priced into the rate, and our comparison pages say when a larger firm is the better buy.

Everything Tenhaw has delivered runs on Microsoft Azure, including Azure OpenAI, with delivery through GitHub, and the build method itself is Git, markdown and a model at maximum reasoning rather than a framework. Beyond that, the useful skills are the ones that transfer across clouds: retrieval and permission-aware knowledge access, tool calling and integration, evaluation harnesses and ground-truth sets, and the identity and access design that decides whether any of it clears a security review. The site lists the platforms we have a view on and no delivery behind, which includes Amazon Bedrock, Amazon SageMaker, Google Vertex AI, Kubernetes, Terraform and Apache Airflow, so an associate who has delivered on one of those brings something the firm does not have.