What We Do

We are experts in cloud infrastructure, observability, CI/CD and automation. While we have experience across related areas like software development, security, and data engineering, infrastructure is our core specialty; though we're always eager to learn and adapt to your specific needs.

We partner with companies as fractional consultants, meaning we work with you part-time on an ongoing basis rather than as traditional full-time employees. This model works particularly well for:

🏢 Growing Companies

Companies that need senior infrastructure expertise but don't have enough work to justify a full-time hire

🚀 Specific Projects

Teams that need guidance on a limited scope goal or migrations (e.g. to the cloud)

📈 Team Development

Organizations looking to level up their existing team's capabilities

Think of us as your part-time infrastructure team leads.

We architect solutions, mentor your developers, implement best practices, and help you avoid common pitfalls, all without the overhead of a full-time senior hire.

Discovery

1

Understanding

We learn about your challenges and how your team operates

2

Planning

Create a Statement of Work outlining responsibilities and deliverables

3

Ramp Up

Get access to tools and environments, with limited scope if needed

Our discovery process is lightweight and hopefully painless that will set all of us up for success. For first-time engagements, we build in ramp time to get access to any tools, repositories, or environments we'll need. If your environment or project is especially complex, we might suggest starting with a limited scope piece of work to ensure everyone is aligned on the output before committing to a longer-term agreement.

How We Partner with Your Team

Because we're most valuable when we understand how your team works, we prefer to embed directly with your engineers - joining your standups, working in your code repositories, and collaborating in your Slack channels.

Core Hours

As fractional resources, we establish core hours that match the scope of our engagement. During these hours we're fully available for meetings, collaboration and focused project work.

Since we're not the long term owners of what we build, we make sure to bring your team members along on the journey with us. This ensures knowledge transfer and sets you up for success after our engagement.

Communication & Availability

We believe clear communication is essential for successful fractional partnerships. Here's what you can expect:

During Core Hours: We're fully available for collaboration, meetings, and real-time problem-solving during our agreed-upon core hours. We typically respond to Slack messages and emails within a few hours during this time.

Outside Core Hours: We check messages periodically but aren't expected to respond immediately. For truly urgent infrastructure issues, we'll provide an escalation path during onboarding, but handling after-hours emergencies isn't part of our fractional engagement model.

We're Not 24/7 Support: As fractional consultants, we're not your on-call team. We'll help you set up monitoring, alerting, and incident response processes, but we're not the ones getting paged at 2 AM. If you need round-the-clock support, we can help you design that capability or recommend partners who specialize in managed services.

Communication Preferences: We prefer your team's instant messenger (Slack, Teams, etc) for day-to-day collaboration and quick questions, email for more formal communications and documentation, and video calls for complex discussions or screen sharing sessions.

Agreement Structures

We structure our engagements in two ways: flat rate, limited scope projects and retainer agreements. We also have a Framework Agreement that outlines foundational terms at the beginning of a relationship, so we can keep individual statements of work focused on the actual work.

Flat Rate Projects

You pay us for a specific outcome or project regardless of how long it takes us to complete the work. This works well for small, self-contained pieces of work like fixing a single server or doing a surface-level cost analysis of cloud spend. Because estimation is difficult to get right, we're very specific about scope with flat rate agreements and generally don't attempt larger multi-month projects this way.

Because there's uncertainty baked into the flat rate model, it's generally more expensive than accomplishing the same work through a retainer agreement. There are things outside our control that we can't account for, and that inevitably adds time and cost to implementation.

Retainer Agreements

Retainers work like working with any other professional (designer, lawyer, etc.) - rather than paying for the outcome, you're paying for a set amount of our time. While this may be a harder sell for some executives since our compensation isn't tied directly to outcomes, it's easier and cheaper to budget for both you and us.

With retainers, we typically work in monthly blocks with clear communication about how time is being spent. This structure allows for more flexibility when priorities shift or unexpected issues arise - which happens frequently in infrastructure work. It also means we can take the time to do things right rather than rushing to hit a fixed scope.

Most of our ongoing fractional partnerships use retainer agreements since they align better with the iterative, collaborative nature of infrastructure and platform work.

Framework Agreements

This is the foundational agreement that contains all the boilerplate and legal language we logically only need to agree to once, rather than renegotiating with every new project. Examples of what's included in a framework agreement: core hours, payment schedules, and ownership of any infrastructure code generated during the engagement (like Terraform modules used to create your infrastructure).