Illustrative engagement. This write-up describes how we approach this kind of work. It is an anonymised archetype rather than a named client project — the figures are representative, not audited.
The second opinion on a codebase nobody wanted to touch.
An architecture and security audit of an acquired platform — followed by the sequenced plan to stabilise it without freezing the roadmap.
A decision, not a 200-page PDF
Deliverable
Ranked by risk and effort
Findings
As many as to start
Recommendations to stop
The challenge
An acquisition came with a platform the buying team could not evaluate: no runbooks, deploys performed by one person from a laptop, and a dependency tree nobody had audited in years. Leadership needed to know whether to invest in it, rebuild it, or retire it — and needed the answer in weeks.
How we approached it
Measured what could be measured — DORA metrics, incident history, dependency and CVE exposure — before offering a single opinion.
Interviewed the engineers who inherited it, because the undocumented workarounds are always where the real risk lives.
Delivered a one-page summary for the person paying, a ranked action list, and an honest read on which actions were not worth doing.
Then executed the top of that list: CI/CD off the laptop, infrastructure into Terraform, observability and an on-call rotation that a team could actually sustain.
What shipped
The platform turned out to be worth keeping, which is not always the answer. Deploys moved into CI, infrastructure became reproducible, and the team inherited runbooks instead of folklore — with a sequenced backlog for everything deliberately left for later.
Could this be your story?
Tell us where you’re stuck. We reply within one business day with next steps.
Start a project- Senior engineers, never juniors
- Weekly demos against a roadmap
- Code, infra, and docs you keep