Landed a real pilot with a mid-size insurance broker. Should I bring in someone local/from university, or keep pushing solo?

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Quick background, I'm self-taught, no CS degree, been building an insurtech product solo (with one co-founder handling domain/business side) for about 1 year now.

Recently we landed something big for us. A mid-large insurance broker wants to pilot our system to replace their outdated internal software. Real business, real revenue, confidential data involved. Pilot starts in one branch, roughly 100-250 people, with a path to all 5 branches if it goes well. They've been fair about pacing, told us we can go slow and build feature by feature instead of rushing.

Here's the thing I'm actually sitting with. Right now it's just me and my co-founder. I'm confident I can build this myself since I've done it before with our main product, but this one has more weight to it than anything I've done so far. So I keep going back and forth: do I bring in someone I trust locally, maybe from my university or hometown, who I can actually sit with and work through problems face to face? Or do I keep going solo since I already know the codebase and the domain better than anyone new would for a while?

Not looking for randoms to join, this has to be someone I'd actually trust with confidential client data.

A few more things I'd love thoughts on:

1. If I do bring someone local in, has anyone structured a fair deal with a trusted person when there isn't much cash upfront, like equity or deferred comp done right?

2. For milestone-based client payment (getting paid as we deliver each feature instead of all at the end), any advice on structuring that so both sides are protected?

3. Any red flags I should watch for going into a pilot like this as a very small, self-taught team?