42MARS
Fractional product leadership and hands-on software delivery.
What we do
Fractional Product Leadership
Senior product leadership without the full-time hire. We own the roadmap, run discovery, and turn fuzzy ideas into shipped outcomes — for a quarter or a year.
Fractional Technical & Engineering Leadership
CTO-level judgment on demand. We set the architecture, raise the engineering bar, and lead your team through launch — then hand the keys back.
Software Design & Development
We design and write production software — taking new products and working prototypes through secure architecture, implementation, and launch.
Security and audit readiness
42Mars helps you prepare to meet applicable certification, attestation, and compliance requirements before your audit. We identify gaps, implement controls with your team, and organize the evidence your assessors need.
We specialize in critical systems, including FDA-approved medical devices, satellites, robotics, and autonomous models. Our security work accounts for the operational constraints of systems where failures can have physical consequences.
Operational security (OpSec)
Protect sensitive operations with threat modeling, least-privilege access, secrets management, and incident response planning. We help your team put secure operating practices into daily use.
Supply chain security
Understand what goes into your systems. We help review suppliers and dependencies, build software bills of materials (SBOMs), and secure build and release processes with artifact provenance and controlled updates.
PCI DSS readiness
Define your payment-data scope, review cardholder data flows, and address control gaps. We help prepare the technical safeguards, operating procedures, and evidence needed for your applicable PCI DSS assessment.
SOC readiness
Prepare for a SOC 2 examination by mapping controls to your system and applicable Trust Services Criteria. We help establish control ownership and evidence collection so your team can demonstrate how controls operate.
HIPAA readiness
Assess risks to electronic protected health information and address gaps in administrative, physical, and technical safeguards. We help document policies, access controls, and response procedures for compliance reviews.
Air-gapped private AI
Employ private AI systems inside your own infrastructure, including air-gapped environments. We help plan local model deployment, data access boundaries, and controlled model and software updates without relying on public AI services.
Before the audit, we help define scope, prioritize remediation, validate controls, and assemble evidence for a readiness review. Independent assessors make audit and attestation decisions; readiness work does not guarantee a passing result. SOC 2 is an attestation, and HIPAA has no government-recognized certification. Medical-device regulatory approval is a separate process.
Sustainable, secure AI workflows
42Mars helps your team put AI to work in a way you can secure, afford, and maintain. Whether you use Claude, Codex, Pi, or another harness or model, we help adapt the workflow to your people, systems, and data boundaries.
Your tools and workflow
Connect AI assistance to the work your team already does, from research and planning to implementation, review, and operations. We help configure your chosen harness, integrate approved tools, and build repeatable workflows with clear human ownership and review.
Sustainable team adoption
Give your team training, documented practices, and evaluations they can maintain. We help measure output quality, cost, and latency, right-size models and context to the task, and reduce unnecessary compute and rework. Your team keeps control as tools and models change.
Hosted frontier models
Use hosted frontier models where your data policies allow. We help review provider retention and data-use terms, define what may leave your environment, and apply least-privilege tool access, sandboxing, and approval steps for consequential actions. Model output and retrieved content stay untrusted until validated.
Private and air-gapped AI
Plan and implement workflows with locally deployable models for private infrastructure and air-gapped environments, including secure Department of Defense (DoD) environments. We help design offline inference, controlled model and dependency transfers, access boundaries, and audit records around the mission's requirements.
For DoD work, model and tool choices must meet the environment's data classification, approved software, and authorization requirements. Air-gapping alone does not establish compliance or authorization; hosted-only services stay outside workflows that require fully offline operation.
Experience that ships
Product leadership, engineering, and software delivery at organizations including
How we work
1. Assess
A fast, honest read of your product, code, and team.
2. Architect
The right product and system design. No over-engineering.
3. Ship
We write, harden, and ship production software alongside your team — then set you up to run it without us.
Let's talk
Need a product built, a prototype productionized, or a team led? One email is all it takes.
Email 42Mars