Where we take on problems
without a known answer

Two engineers and a delivery lead go into your codebase, database and incident history. We read the schema, run a dependency and CVE inventory, sit with the people who actually use the system, and measure what is slow rather than accept what is reported as slow. Output is a written architecture assessment, a risk register with named owners, and a costed delivery sequence carrying a stated ±25% confidence band. Fixed fee, and the documents are yours whether or not the engagement continues.

We record the decisions as architecture decision records: service boundaries, data ownership, sync versus event-driven integration, the consistency model, and what we deliberately are not building. Non-functional targets get numbers — p95 latency, concurrent users, recovery point and recovery time objectives, retention windows. You approve the plan, the team roster by name, and the definition of done before any production code is written.

Infrastructure as Terraform in your cloud account, repositories in your GitHub organisation, CI with unit tests, SAST and container scanning, and Argo CD promotion into staging and production. Before feature work starts we put a thin but real slice of the system into production behind a feature flag, with dashboards, alerts and an on-call runbook attached. That deployment happens in week three and is the point at which the pipeline stops being a promise.

Two-week sprints, trunk-based development, deployment to production on merge behind flags. Each sprint ends with a working increment on your infrastructure, not a demo environment. You get a burn-up against the agreed scope, the DORA four metrics for the team, and an explicit list of what moved out of scope and why. The first release to real users typically lands between weeks 10 and 16, depending on integration surface.

Load testing to twice the agreed peak, with results published as latency percentiles rather than averages. Failure injection on the dependencies that matter — database failover, broker partition, third-party timeout. A third-party penetration test against the release candidate, with every high and critical finding closed before cutover and mediums scheduled with dates. Backup restore is rehearsed in full, timed, and written into the runbook.

Migration runs as a rehearsed sequence with a rollback path measured in minutes, usually strangler-fig routing so the legacy system stays live and reversible. Four weeks of hypercare with our engineers on your on-call rota, then a structured handover: runbooks, architecture diagrams that match the deployed system, recorded walkthroughs and paired shifts with your team. Where you keep us on, the same named engineers move to a run-and-evolve cadence.