We've seen too many architecture engagements that produce impressive diagrams but no real change. Our approach is different: we work alongside your team to solve concrete problems, and we stay accountable for the outcomes.

Architecture Assessment & Review

Before recommending changes, we need to understand what you have. We conduct independent evaluations of existing systems—not to produce a report card, but to identify where architectural decisions are actually causing pain. Technical debt, scalability bottlenecks, security vulnerabilities: we find them, quantify their business impact, and help you prioritize what to fix first. The result is a clear picture of your system's strengths and weaknesses, with actionable recommendations your team can execute.

System Design & Technical Strategy

Whether you're starting from scratch or planning a major refactoring initiative, architectural decisions made early have outsized impact on what comes later. We design systems that balance what you need today with what you'll need in two years—without over-engineering for hypothetical futures. Our designs are pragmatic because we've built and operated the kinds of systems we recommend. We know the difference between elegant theory and what actually works in production.

Technology Selection

Choosing technologies is one of the most consequential decisions a team makes, and it's easy to get wrong. Vendor marketing, hype cycles, and resume-driven development all push toward poor choices. We provide objective guidance based on your specific context: your team's capabilities, your business constraints, your operational requirements. We have no vendor relationships or referral incentives—our only interest is finding the right fit for your situation.

Migration & Modernization Planning

Moving from legacy systems to modern architectures is rarely a straightforward technical exercise. It requires careful sequencing, risk management, and often organizational change alongside the technical work. We've guided organizations through monolith-to-microservices transitions, cloud migrations, and platform modernizations. We help you build a roadmap that accounts for business continuity, team capacity, and the inevitable surprises that emerge mid-migration.

The consulting industry has a reputation for producing expensive documentation that sits unread. We take a different approach: everything we deliver is designed to be used, not filed.

Our architecture documentation is written for the developers who will implement and maintain the system—not for executives who want a summary. We use architecture decision records (ADRs) to capture not just what was decided, but why, and what alternatives were considered. When your team faces a similar decision in the future, they'll understand the reasoning behind the original choice.

For critical or risky architectural changes, we build proof-of-concept implementations to validate assumptions before you commit significant resources. Theory often looks different in practice, and it's better to discover problems early when course corrections are still cheap.

Most importantly, we transfer knowledge throughout the engagement. Your team should own the architecture when we're done—able to evolve it, extend it, and make their own decisions without depending on us. We're successful when you don't need us anymore.

Architecture patterns don't exist in a vacuum—they need to account for the specific constraints and requirements of your domain. We bring deep experience across several demanding environments:

Healthcare & regulated industries: We've designed platforms that meet HIPAA, MDR, and FDA requirements without sacrificing developer velocity. Regulatory compliance adds complexity, but it doesn't have to mean slow, painful development—if the architecture accounts for it from the start.

High-scale consumer systems: E-commerce platforms handling Black Friday traffic spikes, real-time data pipelines processing millions of events per second, distributed systems that need to stay up even when parts fail. We've built and operated systems at scale, and we know where the edge cases hide.

Developer platforms & tooling: Internal platforms, CI/CD infrastructure, and developer experience tooling have their own architectural patterns. The users are engineers, the requirements are unique, and getting it right has multiplicative effects on the rest of the organization.

AI/ML infrastructure: As LLMs and ML models become core to more products, the infrastructure to train, serve, and monitor them requires specialized architectural thinking. We help teams integrate AI capabilities without creating unmaintainable complexity.

Architecture work is most valuable at inflection points—moments when decisions have outsized impact on what comes next.

Starting a new product: The foundation you lay in the first few months will shape development for years. Getting it right early is far cheaper than fixing it later.

Hitting scaling limits: Systems that worked at one scale often break at the next. If you're seeing performance degradation, reliability issues, or development slowdowns as you grow, the architecture may need to evolve.

Planning a major transition: Cloud migrations, platform modernizations, and technology stack changes are high-stakes undertakings. An independent perspective can help you avoid expensive mistakes.

Preparing for due diligence: If funding or acquisition is on the horizon, investors will scrutinize your technical foundations. We can help you understand what they'll find—and address issues before they become deal risks.

Needing a second opinion: Sometimes you just want an experienced outside perspective on a decision you're facing. We're happy to do focused engagements around specific architectural questions.