Hand us the problem nobody on your team has time to solve. We'll ship the fix.
Outsourced senior engineering for the hard, specific infrastructure work: the upgrade everyone is avoiding, the migration that stalled, the incident that keeps coming back. We scope it, do the work in your environment, and hand it back documented and running.
Fixed scope. Fixed price. Done means running in production, not a slide deck.
- Problem
- Three EKS clusters on 1.24, four versions behind. PodSecurityPolicy still in use. Ingress objects on a removed API. The last upgrade attempt took a cluster down for 40 minutes.
- Scope
- Upgrade all three clusters to 1.30. Replace PSP with Pod Security Admission. Migrate Ingress and CronJob manifests. Add a repeatable upgrade runbook and a pre-flight deprecation check to CI.
- Done when
- All clusters on 1.30 with zero customer-facing downtime during cutover, deprecation check green in CI, runbook executed once by your team with us watching.
The work that sits on the roadmap for two quarters because nobody can spare the person.
These are the engagements we take most often. If your problem isn't on the list but lives in the same neighborhood, ask. If we can't finish it, we'll say so before we start.
Kubernetes upgrades that are years behind
Removed APIs, PodSecurityPolicy, CNI and ingress changes, node pool rotation, and the add-ons nobody remembers installing. We get you current and leave a process so it doesn't happen again.
OpenTelemetry rollouts and vendor migrations
Instrument services on OpenTelemetry, stand up the collector pipeline, and move from one backend to another without losing dashboards, alerts, or a week of data.
Bad deploys that undo themselves
Canary deploys with automated analysis and rollback on your five most important services, proven with a deliberate bad deploy in your production. Fixed price, ten days. See automatic rollback.
The incident that keeps coming back
Root cause it for real, fix the underlying defect, and automate the response so the third occurrence is a closed ticket instead of a page.
GitOps and delivery pipeline migrations
Jenkins to GitHub Actions, hand-applied Helm to Argo CD or Flux, one giant chart to a structure your teams can own. Progressive delivery where it earns its keep.
Observability cost resets
Cardinality control, log volume tiering, sampling that keeps the traces you need, and contract-ready numbers on what the bill should be. Usually pays for the engagement in the first quarter.
On-call and alerting rebuilds
SLO-based alerting, rotation design that doesn't burn people out, escalation paths that match how the org actually works, and the noise cut list applied rather than filed.
Multi-cluster, multi-region, and DR
Cluster topology, traffic management, data locality, and a disaster recovery plan that has been executed at least once, not just written down.
Stabilizing a platform after fast growth
Noisy neighbors, missing resource limits, autoscaling that fights itself, environments that drifted. We make it boring again so product teams can ship.
Agent-assisted operations
Build the runbook automation and agent workflows that handle triage and first-line remediation in your environment, with your guardrails, on your tooling.
Scope it, build it, cut it over, hand it back.
Every engagement follows the same four steps. The first one is short and cheap, and it's where we decide together whether the problem is solvable in the time and budget you have.
One week, one document
We read the code, the configs, and the incident history, then write a one-page work order: the problem, the scope, what "done" means, the timeline, and a fixed price.
- Access and environment review
- Written work order with done-when criteria
- Fixed price and timeline
- Your go / no-go
The work, in your environment
We work in your repos, your CI, your cloud accounts, under your access model. Changes go through your review process. Every week you see it running, not a status report.
- Pull requests into your repositories
- Weekly working demo
- Staging proven before production
- Rollback plan for every change
We run the change
We execute the production cutover, in a window you choose, with us on-call for it. If something goes wrong, the rollback plan is ours to run.
- Cutover plan reviewed with your team
- We're on-call during the window
- Verification against done-when criteria
- Sign-off from you, not from us
Your team owns it
Documentation, runbooks, a recorded walkthrough, and a pairing session where someone on your team runs the process with us watching. Then 30 days of support.
- Runbooks and architecture notes in your wiki
- Recorded walkthrough
- Pairing session with your engineers
- 30 days of post-handover support
We're on the hook for the outcome, not the hours.
Most consulting ends with a recommendation. Contract engineering with us ends with the change running in production and your team able to operate it. These are the rules that make that possible.
Fixed price per problem
You pay for the problem to be solved, not for time spent on it. If it takes us longer than we scoped, that's on us.
Your tools, your repos, your access model
Nothing runs from our laptops that can't run from yours. Every change lands as a reviewed pull request in your repositories.
Nothing lands undocumented
A change your team can't explain is a liability we created. Runbooks and architecture notes are part of the scope, not an add-on.
We say no early
If the scope week shows the problem can't be solved in the time or budget you have, we tell you then, and you've only paid for the week.
Senior engineers only
The person who scopes the work is the person who does it. No handoff to a bench.
Production is the finish line
Done means running, verified against the criteria in the work order, and signed off by you.
Good fit
- A specific, nameable problem with a clear end state.
- Kubernetes and cloud-native infrastructure, on AWS, GCP, or Azure.
- A team that will own the result and wants to learn how it works.
- Someone with authority to grant access and sign off on production changes.
Probably not
- Filling a seat by the hour for an open-ended period. For ongoing coverage, see managed reliability.
- Greenfield application development.
- A problem that hasn't been scoped yet. The incident audit is the right place to start.
Describe the problem in a paragraph. We'll tell you if we can solve it.
Send us the problem, the stack, and roughly when you need it done. We'll reply with whether it's something we take on and what the scoping week would look like.