Systems architecture and cloud infrastructure
Most systems do not fall over because of one bad decision. They fall over because of thirty small ones nobody wrote down. We design the architecture, put the infrastructure in code, and leave you with a diagram that matches what is actually running.
What the work actually involves
Architecture review
A written assessment of what you have: the bottlenecks, the single points of failure, the cost you cannot see.
Infrastructure as code
AWS, GCP or bare metal described in Terraform, so an environment can be rebuilt rather than remembered.
Reliability work
Backups that are restored on a schedule, monitoring that pages a human, and failure paths that were tested on purpose.
Cost engineering
Cloud bills read line by line — most of the saving is in things nobody has looked at since launch.
How we work
We start by reading, not by quoting
Before a number exists we go through the brief, the existing code and whatever is already in production. You get a written plan with dates and the risks named — usually within a week. If the honest answer is that you do not need us, you get that instead.
A small senior team with one owner
Two to five engineers, one lead who is accountable for the outcome and answers your messages. No account manager relaying questions, no rotating bench, no juniors learning on your budget.
Everything is yours from day one
Repositories, cloud accounts, domains and pipelines are in your name from the first commit, not handed over at the end. When the engagement stops, nothing stops working.
Questions clients ask first
We are on one big server. Do we need microservices?+
Probably not. Most teams under fifty engineers are better served by one well-structured application than by twelve services and a distributed-tracing problem. We say so when it is true, which costs us the bigger project and saves you the year.
Can you work with our existing DevOps team?+
Yes, and that is the usual arrangement. We write the architecture and the Terraform with your engineers rather than around them, because infrastructure nobody on staff understands is an outage waiting for our next holiday.
How do you prove the backups work?+
By restoring them on a schedule into a throwaway environment and checking the result. A backup that has never been restored is a file, not a backup, and the difference is only ever discovered on the worst day.
Are you the engineer, not the client?
We staff this work partly from independent developers and studios verified on our own platform, and the same platform is how contractors outside the US invoice American clients and get paid.
How that worksOther things we do
Custom software development for companies in the US, Canada and the EU
Websites and SaaS products, built to be measured
AI agents and automated workflows that run in production
Putting AI inside a product that already has users
Demand generation for companies that sell something complicated
Tell us what you are building
A short description of the problem is enough to start. We reply with what we would do, what it would take, and what we would not touch.
Discuss a project