No black box. Every engagement follows the same 4-phase rhythm, with deliverables you can take in-house at any stage. We're as transparent about how we work as we are about what we ship.
Every engagement runs Phase 01 → 04. Phase length depends on scope; deliverables don't.
Read the codebase, talk to your engineers, audit infrastructure, understand the business pressure. Output: written report on what's working, what's load-bearing-but-fragile, and where leverage is. You can stop here if you want — we charge a fixed fee for the assessment alone.
Reference architecture, ADRs, tradeoff matrix, cost projections, migration path with rollback at every step. Reviewed by your senior engineers before any new code. You can take this to another shop and they'll be able to execute.
Embedded engineering — your repos, your standups, your code review. Pair-programming so knowledge transfer is real-time. Weekly executive checkpoint with honest status reporting (good news AND bad news).
Operate-with engagement: your team owns production, we sit shadow on-call. Runbooks, dashboards, postmortem culture established. By the end, you don't need us — and we leave behind capability, not dependency.
We offer three commercial structures. We'll recommend which fits your situation on the first call.
Defined scope, defined timeline, defined price. Best for: assessments, design phases, well-scoped implementations. You get predictability; we get the discipline of writing a clear scope before starting. Change orders handled in writing.
Hourly or daily rates against a not-to-exceed cap. Best for: open-ended explorations, embedded engineering where scope evolves, operations support. Weekly burn-rate reports and strict cap discipline.
Reserved senior bench at a monthly fee. Best for: ongoing advisory, fractional CTO/CIO/CISO support, on-demand technical leadership. Usage rolls forward; we don't penalize light months.
The faster we can answer "is this a good fit," the less of your time we waste.
What you're trying to accomplish, what's blocking, what success looks like. Doesn't need to be polished — bullet points are fine.
Who's the decision-maker, who's the technical sponsor, who'll be working with us day-to-day. Helps us assemble the right bench.
Hard regulatory deadlines, budget cap, contractual blockers, vendor commitments. Bad news early is cheap.
Architecture docs, runbooks, postmortems, recent assessments. Under NDA. We honor read-only and limited-distribution requests.
30 minutes, senior architect, no slides. We'll tell you within the call whether this is a fit.