Case studies
Four engagements, including the two that stopped.
No client is named here. Every engagement runs under an NDA covering the client's identity, so each write-up gives the industry, the country, and the approximate headcount instead. Two of the four did not end the way anyone planned: one client was acquired 19 months in, another paused the programme after two of six domains. Both are written up with the figures they reached before they stopped.
The four write-ups
Each one follows the same order: the situation we were called into, what we did, what changed with the figures attached, and how the engagement ended. Team sizes ran from two to four engineers and durations from 8 to 19 months. Every technology named is one of the ten we staff against, except where a page names the client's inherited stack.
The three engagement shapesDispatch platform rebuild
Routing pulled out of a Rails monolith into a Go service one route type at a time, with the monolith serving live traffic throughout. On the routes moved, p95 dispatch latency went from 2.4 s to 780 ms.
Claims ingestion pipeline
A nightly batch replaced with Kafka-based ingestion and a daily reconciliation report; dropped records went from about 40 a week to zero across 11 months. The client was then acquired, moved onto the acquirer's platform, and the engagement closed early.
Checkout service extraction
Checkout taken out of a .NET monolith by strangler fig, which moved deploys from one a month to three a week. Two of six planned domains were extracted before the client paused the programme for a funding round.
Data platform handover
An unowned dbt/Airflow platform documented and stabilised after the original team left, with two in-house hires trained to run it. The exit date was set in the first week of the engagement and the team left on it.
Ask about the two that stopped.
Two of the four stopped before the scoped work was finished — one acquisition, one funding round. Ask what the last three months of each looked like; that is the part a write-up compresses.