AI-native engineer
An engineer who ships with a supervised AI agent stack (Cursor, Claude Code, model APIs), not someone who occasionally pastes from ChatGPT. The premium: 2–3× output per engineer in practice.
A
B
Bench
Engineers a staffing firm employs full-time while waiting for client placements. Lateral doesn't have one; our engineers are placed when they join the network.
C
COR (Contractor of Record)
A service that takes legal responsibility for paying and contracting an independent contractor on your behalf. Lateral acts as COR for placements that aren't structured as full employees.
D
Delivery lead
The senior person in every Lateral team who owns coordination, sequencing, and exec-facing communication. One per team.
Discovery phase
A pre-build phase some agencies bill heavily for. At Lateral, discovery is bundled into the engagement. We don't bill it separately.
Dedicated success lead
A non-billable Lateral employee paired 1:1 with every embedded engineer. Their job: helping the engineer thrive on the client engagement.
E
Embedded engineer
A senior engineer who works full-time inside your team and tools, contracted and supported by Lateral, and billed monthly.
EOR (Employer of Record)
A service that hires staff in a country on your behalf, taking responsibility for payroll, tax, and compliance. Lateral acts as EOR for international placements.
Eval-first development
For ML / AI work: building the evaluation harness before the model. Ensures every model release is judged against a fixed gold-set, preventing regressions.
G
Gold set
A curated set of test cases (often historical data with known correct answers) used to evaluate ML models before release. The bar every Lateral AI model has to pass.
N
Nearshore
Talent placed in a time zone close to the client's. For US-based clients, "nearshore" usually means LATAM (UTC-3 to UTC-6).
O
Outcome team
A Lateral team engagement where the deliverable is an outcome (a launched product, a hit metric) rather than hours billed.
P
Press-release-first
Writing the launch announcement before any code ships. Forces the team to clarify "what changes for the user" before debating "how do we build it."
Pre-composed team
A team where the roles and ratios are defined upfront (1 lead, 2 engineers, 1 designer, etc.) so onboarding takes a week instead of a quarter.
R
Replacement guarantee
If a placed engineer doesn't work out, Lateral replaces them within 14 days at no cost. Used in fewer than 4% of placements.
S
Senior engineer
At Lateral: 7+ years post-degree as primary author of production code, with at least one shipped system they can walk through end-to-end.
Staff augmentation
Adding outside engineers to an existing in-house team. Different from a team: you manage the engineers directly; we handle sourcing, payroll, and tooling.
Studio engagement
A Lateral engagement where we own the outcome end to end: strategy, design, engineering. Different from talent/teams, where you direct the work.
Supervised agent stack
An AI tooling setup where the engineer remains accountable for output but uses AI agents (often plural, often parallel) to accelerate. Default at Lateral.
T
Time-to-ship
The metric Lateral measures itself by: from brief to first PR merged. Industry median is months; ours is days.
Top 1%
Lateral's acceptance rate into the network. We see ~50,000 candidates a year and take fewer than one in a hundred.
Two-week prototype
A Lateral fixed-scope sprint: a working prototype your board can react to in 10 working days. Fixed price, fixed scope, no surprises.