IT & TECHNOLOGY CONSULTING

Senior engineering judgement for the decisions that are expensive to reverse.

Technology Consulting

A second opinion from people who still write code

Most costly technology decisions are made with incomplete information and no way to test them cheaply. We give founders and product leaders a straight read on architecture, cost, risk and delivery — from engineers who will be honest when the answer is “leave it alone”.

  • Practitioners, not analystsThe people advising you are the people who ship
  • Short and specificMost engagements run one to four weeks with a clear output
  • No vendor incentiveWe are not resellers, so the recommendation is just the recommendation

What we are usually called in for

Architecture review

Will this design hold at ten times the load, and what will it cost to run? Where are the single points of failure nobody has looked at since launch?

Technical due diligence

Buying a company, or raising against a product. We assess code quality, security posture, key-person risk and what the roadmap will really cost.

Cloud cost & performance

Where the bill is going, which of it is waste, and which slow query is quietly setting your infrastructure budget.

Legacy modernisation

A realistic path off an ageing system, in slices that keep the business running — usually not the rewrite people expect us to recommend.

Team & delivery

Why shipping has slowed. Hiring plans, team shape, code review and release practices, and where the process is fighting the work.

AI readiness

Whether your data, product and team can support an AI initiative — and which use case is worth doing first, if any.

How an engagement runs

  1. Scope the question

    A call to work out what decision you are actually trying to make, and what evidence would settle it.

  2. Go deep

    We read the code, the infrastructure and the metrics, and talk to the engineers doing the work.

  3. Report

    Findings ranked by impact and effort, written so both your board and your engineers can read it.

  4. Help execute

    Optional. We can implement the recommendations, or coach your team through them.

Ground we cover

We advise on the same technologies we build with daily — the recommendations come from having run these things in production, not from a comparison table.

Architecture & platform

Monolith or services, managed or self-run, one region or several. Usually the answer is simpler than the team fears, and we will make the case for that.

  • AWS
  • Google Cloud
  • Docker
  • Kubernetes
  • Terraform

Application stacks

Enough depth in each to judge whether a codebase is in reasonable shape, and to spot the decisions that will hurt in eighteen months.

  • Ruby on Rails
  • Node.js
  • Python
  • .NET
  • React

Data & AI

Data model, query performance and retention — plus an honest read on whether an AI feature is a genuine advantage or an expensive distraction.

  • PostgreSQL
  • Elasticsearch
  • pgvector
  • LangGraph
  • OpenAI

Delivery & governance

How work gets from idea to production, where it queues, and which of your controls are real versus documented.

  • CI/CD review
  • Code quality
  • Security posture
  • Observability
  • Backlog & process

What you walk away with

Deliverables you can act on, share with a board, or hand to whoever does the work next — including a different vendor.

  • A written assessment with findings ranked by impact
  • Architecture diagrams reflecting what actually exists
  • A prioritised remediation plan with rough effort
  • Cost modelling for the options on the table
  • Risks named plainly, including the ones nobody raised
  • A working session with your team to talk it through