The Practice

We deliver scoped work to spec.

A principal-led practice, composed per engagement. Bring us a clear problem and we’ll bring the senior team to ship it — to spec, on schedule, with nothing wasted. Product instinct meets infrastructure depth, coordinated by a principal who stays on the work from kickoff to handover.

How We Engage
Discovery

Architecture review, technical due diligence, or scoping a planned build. Time-boxed, fixed fee. Often the front end of a longer engagement.

Delivery

You have a clear outcome. We scope the solution, price it end-to-end, and ship it. This is where most of the work sits.

Continued partnership

Repeat engagements with clients we’ve shipped for before. Same model, known domain, faster setup — our favorite kind of work.

How We Work

Shipped, not staffed.

Tell us the outcome, we’ll quote the project, we’ll ship it. No time-and-materials, no staff augmentation, no hour padding.

Clear outcome

You know what you want built and why. We scope, price, and ship against that. If the outcome is still being negotiated, start with a discovery engagement first.

One price, one outcome

We don’t sell team-weeks, retainers, or staff augmentation. You pay for the thing you asked for, shipped.

A counterpart who can decide

Someone with authority to answer questions and sign off. Engagements move at the speed of the person signing off.

We’d rather have a handful of clients who keep coming back than a rolodex of one-shots.

Disciplines

We maintain a curated network of senior collaborators across the disciplines a modern product needs. Engagement-specific, not staffed-to-bench. Every person we bring in is someone we’d hire if we were running your team full-time.

Product Engineering

Full-stack delivery. Next.js, TypeScript, Go, Python. Architecture through ship.

Cloud Architecture

AWS, GCP, Kubernetes. Multi-tenant SaaS, air-gapped environments, regulated industries.

DevSecOps

Supply chain security, CI/CD, observability, incident response.

Product Design & UX

Interface design, user flows, and aesthetics. Figma-first, production-grade components. What ships matches the mockup.

Growth & Content

Technical positioning, developer marketing, long-form content that converts.

Strategy & Research

Market sizing, competitive landscape, technical validation before a dollar is spent.

Track Record
2025–now
DACHS IT — Air-Gapped Government Cloud

Cloud architecture, supply chain security, and deployment strategies for containerized on-premises environments. DevSecOps for high-security air-gapped infrastructure.

Cloud Architecture · DevSecOps
2022–2025
EdgeIQ — IoT Platform at Scale 100× · 99.95%

Scaled infrastructure from 100 to 10,000 msg/sec while maintaining 99.95% uptime over 2+ years. Led engineering team of 5. Introduced full observability stack (OpenTelemetry, DataDog, PagerDuty), reducing false-positive alerts by 95%. Millions of connected devices processing billions of events.

Product Engineering · Cloud Architecture
2022–2023
milia.io — Tax & Accounting Cloud Platform Acquired by Visma

Built the complete AWS cloud infrastructure from scratch. Multi-tenant compliance platform with 10+ containerized microservices, multi-account setup, automated CI/CD pipelines, and enterprise integrations (DATEV, DocuSign).

Cloud Architecture · DevSecOps
2017–2019
Silexica — C/C++ Cloud IDE Acquired by AMD/Xilinx

Took a desktop-only compiler tool to the cloud in under 3 months. 5× more cloud signups than desktop downloads. Generated 65% of qualified leads at peak. Led a team of 5.

Product Engineering
2009–2017
Industrial Automation & Embedded Systems

C/C++, Qt5, Siemens SCADA, machine development, and production integration. The foundation for everything we build today.

Product Engineering
Principal
Hanno Kolvenbach
Founder & Principal Engineer

M.Sc. & B.Sc. — RWTH Aachen

Business Administration & Mechanical Engineering

Exchange: Riga Technical University (Entrepreneurship)

RWTH Scholarship recipient (Holste-Stiftung)

Fifteen years across embedded systems, cloud platforms, and AI startups. Previously VP of Product Development at EdgeIQ (scaled 100× to 10K msg/sec over 2+ years at 99.95% uptime). Built cloud infrastructure for milia.io (acquired by Visma) and SLX.cloud (acquired by AMD/Xilinx). Kubestronaut — all five CNCF Kubernetes certifications. AWS Solutions Architect Professional. Author of Scalable Cloud Applications on AWS (educative.io, 2022).

Certifications
Verify on Credly ↗
Kubestronaut
All 5 CNCF Kubernetes certifications
CKA + CKS + CKAD
Certified Kubernetes Admin, Security, App Dev
KCSA + KCNA
Kubernetes Security & Cloud Native Associate
AWS Solutions Architect
Professional + Associate
LFCS + LFCA
Linux Foundation Certified Sysadmin & IT Associate
Pragmatic Product Manager
PMC Level III
Why This Model

Most engineering shops specialize in one layer. Our principal has built across all of them — embedded firmware, cloud platforms, product strategy, team leadership — and that range is what lets us make architecture decisions single-layer teams miss.

Fixed teams create fixed costs. Those show up as bench time on your invoice, specialists you don’t need this quarter, and generalists forced into roles that aren’t theirs. We build the team your engagement actually needs, then stand it down when the work ships.

Yes, our hourly rate runs above generalist agencies. That’s the point. Paying top-of-market is how we access top-of-market — roughly the 1% of practitioners who ship more in a week than a mid-tier engineer ships in a month. Combine that with tight scoping and small-pod structure, and the arithmetic flips: a three-person senior pod typically costs less, end-to-end, than a five-engineer six-month retainer of mid-tier talent. Per hour we cost more. Per shipped outcome, consistently less.

We use AI as a daily force multiplier — not as a feature we’re selling, but as the reason a small pod can deliver senior-level depth at a pace that wasn’t possible two years ago.

Working on something that needs our kind of team?

Tell us about it. We’ll tell you honestly whether we’re the right fit.