For a design that should still hold in eighteen months
Hire Technical Architects
A system can look architecturally sound in a review and still buckle the moment real growth actually hits it. Technical architects are tested on catching that gap before it becomes an incident, then placed to keep one system's design honest as it evolves. That means scalability designed in deliberately and debt ranked by what it actually costs.
- Profiles typically within two business days
- Replacement Assurance: If an engineer is not the right fit, a replacement from our own team starts within ten business days of your request, at no extra cost
- You interview before placement if you want to
- At least four hours a day inside your core working hours. Two hours plus a daily written handover for the US West Coast
- 14-Day Risk-Free Trial: For your first engineer on a time-and-materials engagement. Up to 14 calendar days or 80 logged working hours, whichever comes first. End within the trial and pay nothing for trial hours. Continue beyond it and those hours are billed at the agreed rate. Unpaid trial work remains ours if you stop
How we evaluate a technical architect
The tasks, the signals and the onboarding, walked through by the people who run them.
90 secSample frame · video pending01Published, not promised
The assessment behind every architect we send.
The technical-architecture bar is published, not assumed: five competencies, the exact task behind each, and the shortcut that ends a candidacy. Most interviews ask which patterns someone can name. This one asks whether a system's design will still hold under real growth.
What we listen forWhether scalability and reliability are designed in, not bolted on after an incident.
A system needs to support ten times its current traffic within a year without a rewrite. Propose the design approach.
- What strong sounds like
- Identifies the specific components that would buckle first and designs around that bottleneck deliberately, not the system generically.
- What gives us pause
- Proposes adding more servers uniformly without identifying which specific component would actually fail under the increased load.
System Design Patterns · Scalability Modelling · Reliability Engineering
Technical Debt Audits · Coding Standards · Architecture Governance
Architecture Decision Records · C4 Diagrams · Design Review Boards
Cloud-native Stacks · Kubernetes · Observability Tooling
02Who you actually meet
The bench, priced by seniority.
Three seniority tiers, priced honestly, and the engineers who fill each one today. Real names and photos take their place as soon as we can share them, and the standard stays exactly the same.
Engineer
Features scoped tightly enough to ship inside your review bar, every time.
The right first hire when your seniors already set the standard.
$3,000–3,800per month
Senior
The hard module nobody else wants to own, taken end to end.
Ownership of a surface, without adding a manager to your headcount.
$4,100–5,100per month
Lead
The workstream's decisions, made daily, so nothing waits on a meeting.
One accountable voice for a pod or initiative that can't afford to drift.
$5,400–6,700per month
Technical architect
6 yrs · US East overlap
Redesigned a system's scaling pattern after a non-functional requirement kept getting deprioritised under delivery pressure
- System Design
- Scalability
- Technical Debt Triage
Senior technical architect
9 yrs · UK + EU hours
Kept a system's implementation aligned with its design across eighteen months and three delivery teams
- Architecture Governance
- Design Patterns
- Reliability Engineering
Principal technical architect
13 yrs · EU + US split
Owns the technical-standard review that keeps a dozen teams building on one system consistently
- Architecture
- Standards Setting
- Cross-team Alignment
Indicative ranges, representative profiles. Exact figures and named engineers arrive with your shortlist.
Weighing this against a freelancer, a direct hire or a marketplace? See the honest comparison
03From stated problem to first change
Four steps, each closing on evidence.
This process tests design judgement under real system constraints, not a list of patterns memorised. Stepping away at any point along the way costs you nothing.
Define the strain in the system
We map where your system's scalability, reliability or debt is actually under pressure. The brief names that strain, not a list of architecture certifications to hold.
A brief your leads signMatch against your system
Candidates are screened against your actual architecture, your growth trajectory and your review culture. Three architects who understand your system beat thirty who list patterns on a CV.
Three fits, not thirty CVsAssess on the real tasks
Your team can watch the scalability-redesign and debt-prioritisation exercises directly. What shows up is design judgement, not familiarity with the latest framework name.
Evaluation you can watchOnboard inside your process
Access, standards and a first architecture decision scoped to real pressure in your system. Continuity cover keeps a departure from ever becoming your design gap.
A merged change in week one
04Evidence and proof
Architects who kept a system's design honest.
Technical-architecture proof is a system that kept scaling on its own design, not a document nobody consulted again. Every record here waits for written client approval before production.
Explore case studies
A payments system redesigned to survive ten times its transaction volume.
Vela Ledger's core ledger service was architected for its launch volume and started buckling as transactions grew. An embedded technical architect redesigned the service's scaling boundaries and reliability model before the next volume spike arrived, not after an outage forced the question.
- Peak transaction headroom
- Roughly tenfold
- Outages during the redesign
- None
She found the exact place our platform would have broken under next year's growth, months before it happened.
Sample · pending client approval
The technical debt got ranked by what it was actually costing us, not by which code looked oldest.
Sample · pending client approval
05Three shapes, one standard
Add an architect, a systems pod, or a practice.
Most teams start with one architect strengthening a system that already exists. Some need a pod that owns a system's design end to end. Where a system needs building from the ground up, we point you to the practice instead.
- Team extension
One named architect
A single technical architect inside your direction and your reviews. The smallest commitment, and the most common starting point.
- Delivery pods
A systems pod
A pod with its own lead that owns a system's scalability and design integrity end to end. You set priorities while the pod carries delivery.
- Software architecture
The practice, not the person
Where a system needs designing from the ground up rather than strengthened, software architecture takes that scope on instead.
06Straight answers
Asked before a technical architect hire is signed.
01What does a technical architect actually do day to day?
Designs for scalability and reliability before they become an incident, ranks technical debt by real cost, and keeps implementation honest against the documented design. The unglamorous majority of the work is catching drift long before it reaches a postmortem.
02How is this different from a solution architect?
A technical architect stays one level down inside a single system, owning its scalability, reliability and long-term design integrity. A solution architect operates at the business-to-technology boundary instead, choosing the overall approach and defending it to the people funding it.
03Can we run our own interviews as well?
Yes, the published tasks are built to be reused directly. Several clients now run the debt-prioritisation exercise themselves in later hiring rounds.
04How fast can a technical architect start?
A shortlist arrives within days from a bench evaluated on an ongoing basis. After that, the timeline mostly comes down to how quickly your side can open up codebase and design access.
05Who manages the technical architect day to day?
Your leads decide priorities and own the roadmap; the architect answers to your review process, not to us. Employment, continuity, payroll and replacement risk are what we handle behind that.
06What if the technical architect is not the right fit?
Raise it in the first few weeks and the replacement costs nothing extra. We use the specifics of the mismatch to brief whoever comes next, so it rarely repeats.
07Do your technical architects use AI tools?
Yes, to draft first-pass diagrams and documentation quickly. Every architectural decision, tradeoff and standard that gets enforced stays the direct accountability of the architect.
08How does pricing work for a hired technical architect?
A technical architect's rate reflects the system's complexity and the standard of ongoing accountability you need. Expect the shortlist to carry a firm monthly number, not a placeholder, billed month to month with a notice-period exit and no fee to start.