Senior people, narrow scope, visible progress.

What we build

• Retrieval systems over messy internal corpora — chunking, hybrid search, reranking, citation you can audit.
• Agentic workflows with real tool boundaries, retries and human checkpoints where the stakes require them.
• Evaluation harnesses first: a regression suite for model behaviour, so a prompt change can't silently break production.
• Cost and latency budgets tracked per request, with caching and model routing that keeps them honest.
• Fine-tuning and distillation when — and only when — the numbers justify it over a better prompt.

What we won't do

Bolt a chat box onto a product that doesn't need one. If a lookup table and a well-designed form solve it, we'll tell you that and charge you for a much smaller project.

Typical shape

• Data model and API design before a line of interface code.
• Typed from database to browser; the compiler catches what tests would otherwise have to.
• Design and build in the same room — no throwing mockups over a wall.
• CI, preview environments and one-command deploys on day one, not month three.
• Accessibility and performance treated as acceptance criteria, not a later ticket.

Stack we reach for

TypeScript, React, Node, Python, Postgres, and whichever cloud you're already committed to. We're not religious about it — we're religious about you being able to hire for it afterwards.

Where we usually find it

• Query patterns that were fine at ten thousand rows and are not fine at ten million.
• Missing observability — you can't fix what you can't see, so we instrument before we optimise.
• Cloud spend growing faster than usage, almost always in egress, idle capacity or over-provisioned managed services.
• Deploys nobody trusts, so nobody deploys, so every release is enormous and terrifying.

How we deliver it

Measured before-and-after on every change. If we can't show you the graph moving, we didn't do the work.

Two weeks, written down

• Codebase health, architecture risk and the real cost of the next twelve months of roadmap.
• Team assessment: key-person risk, hiring reality, what happens if the founding engineer leaves.
• Security and compliance posture at a level a board can read.
• A blunt list of what we'd fix first, in order, with rough effort attached.

Delivered as a written report plus a live session. We don't soften findings to keep a deal warm.