For companies that have already tried hiring. Distributed systems, database internals, realtime infra, and the migrations nobody wants to own. Eight engineers, no PMs, no consultants billing on top.
We've done 31. These are the ones with a metric we can publish and a client who agreed to be quoted.
BIDS ASKS 108.42 x 12 108.51 x 8 108.41 x 31 108.52 x 22 108.39 x 7 108.53 x 4 108.36 x 9 108.55 x 18 ─── matching ──────────── ▸ 108.42 → 108.51 filled 8
We're systems engineers. We don't do mobile apps, CRUD frontends, ML training pipelines, or growth experiments. We have a list of friends who do.
Coordination, consensus, replication, partitioning. We've built three custom Raft implementations and we'd rather not build a fourth — but we will.
Storage engines, query planners, MVCC, write-ahead logs. Forks of Postgres, RocksDB, FoundationDB. We read mailing lists for fun.
Streaming, queues, CDC, websockets at scale. We've replaced four self-hosted Kafka deployments with Redpanda or NATS — and once gone the other way.
Postgres → Cockroach, MongoDB → Postgres, monolith → cells. Dual-writes, shadow reads, cutover plans that survive contact with reality.
When the P95 stops budging. Profiling, flame charts, allocator tuning, sometimes a rewrite of one hot loop in something not interpreted.
Two of us drop into your team for 8–12 weeks, write code in your repos, present at your standup, and leave runbooks the surviving team can read.
Every engagement starts with a 1-hour scoping call and a 4-week fixed-bid pilot. If the pilot doesn't earn the bigger engagement, we shake hands and you keep the code.
One hour, two engineers from our side, no slides. You describe the problem; we ask the kind of questions that tell you whether we know what we're talking about.
Four weeks, fixed bid, scoped to a single deliverable that ships. We're looking to find out whether we work well together before either side commits.
Six to sixteen weeks, time-and-materials, weekly Friday demos. Two to four of our engineers in your repos. We write production code, not memos.
Runbooks, architecture docs, on-call rotation overlap, and an open Slack for thirty days after. We've never invoiced for the support window.
Forecast came to us in late 2023. Their realtime query engine handled 24k QPS at peak; their largest prospective customer needed to clear 200k QPS before signing. The internal team had two solid attempts at the rewrite that didn't ship.
We spent the first two weeks reading the existing code and writing a benchmark harness their team would trust. The verdict: the storage layer wasn't actually the bottleneck — the router was doing a per-request consistent-hash on the wrong field, and the WAL was fsync-on-every-write.
The pilot replaced the router and batched the WAL. That alone got them to 84k QPS. From there it was four months of sharding, hot-shard rebalancing, and a leaner replication protocol. We shipped together with their team — Slack pairing, weekly demos, no slide deck ever produced.
They closed the deal in April 2024. Their engineering team picked up where we left off. Eighteen months on the architecture is still theirs, not ours.
"Workshop showed up, read the code, and on day five told us exactly why the rewrite kept failing. They were right. Six months later the system carries our biggest customer."
Nobody on the website is a junior we're going to swap onto your project. The people on the pitch call are the people in your repos.
Email [email protected] with a paragraph: what you're building, what's breaking, what you've already tried. Two of our engineers read every inbound. Typical response: 24 hours.