The same six stages as above, in plain prose — for readers, and for anything that reads on their behalf.
01Scope
An engagement starts with an architecture walkthrough, an account inventory, and your top three worries. Before the scoping call happens, automation has already run public-surface reconnaissance and rough asset counts, so we arrive informed rather than asking you to describe your own estate. The call itself is run by the engineer who will do the work, and that engineer argues with your assumptions and then writes the scope personally. The result is a written scope with explicit in-and-out boundaries, agreed rules for destructive actions, and a fixed price that does not move after signature. When the honest answer is that you don't need the engagement yet, we say that instead, and the process ends there.
02Inventory & Reconnaissance
With scoped, revocable read access that you issue, automation enumerates identities, resources, network reachability, and data paths across every account and project in scope. Configuration state, policy documents, logging coverage, and exposure mapping are collected into a single environment graph. No engineer touches this stage — it is exactly the work that used to consume the first week of a traditional engagement, and it is the reason ours doesn't. The output is a complete graph of what you actually run, and you receive it whether or not the engagement goes on to find anything interesting: an accurate inventory has standalone value even when the news is good.
03AI-Assisted Analysis
The environment graph is combined with current threat intelligence, and machine analysis correlates signals a human would otherwise read serially: which permissive role is reachable from which exposed service, and which finding matters because of what sits behind it. A first-pass triage ranks candidates by real exploitability rather than by scanner severity labels. Every candidate on that list is then reviewed by an engineer. Machine output is never forwarded to you as a finding — it is the starting point for human validation, not a deliverable. The stage produces a ranked candidate list that stays internal; its only job is to direct expensive human attention at the places most likely to matter.
04Human Validation
This stage is where the fee goes, and nothing in it is automated. Working from the ranked candidates — and from the parts of your architecture that worry us independently of any tool — engineers build and prove exploit chains end to end, draw threat models against how your system actually behaves, and pursue the business-logic and multi-step attacks that no scanner enumerates. Candidates that don't survive scrutiny are dropped rather than padded into the report. What leaves the stage is a set of confirmed findings with reproducible steps, reported as they are confirmed — a critical finding on day two reaches you on day two, not on the delivery date.
05Findings & Remediation Engineering
Each confirmed finding is written up by the engineer who found it: the impact, the attack path, and a fix designed for your environment and constraints rather than a generic recommendation. Where the fix is code or policy, we write the code or the policy; where it is an architectural change, we draw it. Automation handles the mechanical parts — report assembly, evidence collection, and cross-referencing. You receive the full report, the remediation artifacts themselves, and an executive summary that states impact plainly without inflating it, written for the people who have to decide what to fund.
06Verify
After you deploy fixes, automation re-executes the original proof for every finding and runs regression checks on the surrounding surface, so "fixed" is demonstrated rather than asserted. Engineers apply judgment where the result is not binary: when a mitigation reduces risk without removing it, we say so plainly instead of marking it green. Every finding ends the engagement marked fixed, partially fixed, or accepted, each with evidence attached. The engagement ends here, at verified remediation, not at PDF delivery.