From "It Works On My Laptop" to Happy Paying Customers

How We Help

Every early-stage startup faces the same challenging equation: Move fast enough to find product-market fit. Don’t break things when customers are watching. Don’t over-invest before you know what you’re building. Don’t under-invest and watch it all fall apart on launch day.

We’ve spent years solving this exact problem—at Second Life, in federal healthcare systems, in our own startups.

We’ve learned what actually matters. This isn’t about building your forever infrastructure. It’s about building what gets you to the next level, then the next, then the next. We handle the thankless backend work so you can focus on what differentiates your business.

Here’s what that means: we follow practices that will make a meaningful difference.. Get your deployment automated first, even for a “Hello World” page. Build in observability before you need it. Design every system knowing you’ll migrate away from it. And it’s in our best interest to teach them to you and your team.

We will likely hire them again soon if you don’t.

Who We Are

We’re three senior engineers who met while modernizing systems that couldn’t afford to fail—the first Medicare data warehouse, healthcare.gov, Second Life’s virtual world infrastructure. Together, we’ve founded companies, scaled engineering teams from 2 to 200, and learned exactly when to use boring technology and when to push boundaries.

More importantly, we’ve all walked away from comfortable big tech salaries because we refused to build things we couldn’t stand behind. We work with founders and teams who are trying to create something that matters, not just extract value. We want our work to matter. We’ve spent the last decade bringing modern engineering practices into places that desperately needed them—federal agencies, healthcare systems, companies trying to do something real.

We’re not here to guide your product strategy or co-opt your vision. That’s yours. We here to build you a rock-solid foundation while you figure out what the future looks like.

Elizabeth Eady

Infrastructure engineering leader and practitioner with 15 years of making brittle systems bulletproof. Scaled teams at Truss, Optimizely, and Nuna. Berkeley mathematician who believes the best code is the code you don't have to write.

Mark Ferlatte

Co-founded Truss and grew it to 150 people over 14 years—no VCs, just revenue. Before that, fixed healthcare.gov during its crisis and ran engineering teams at Second Life through a hypergrowth phase. Knows exactly when to use boring technology and when your boring choice will burn you.

Alexi Kostibas

Built products and teams at Truss, Second Life, and his own startups for 15+ years. Equally comfortable debugging Kubernetes and customer contracts. The rare engineer who's closed enterprise deals and knows why they won.

How We Work With You

• First Call: 30 minutes, free. You tell us what’s broken or what’s keeping you up at night. We tell you if we can help and roughly how we’d approach it. You decide if you like what you hear.
• Discovery Sprint: One week of embedded work. We audit your current state, identify the critical path risks, and deliver a prioritized roadmap. You can take this roadmap to anyone—no lock-in.
• Engagement: We work with you week by week, focused on what’s needed now. We’re not your permanent team; we’re the specialists who come in, solve the hard problems, and hand off cleanly. You’ll see us in your communications systems, landing PRs, and working with your team.
• Knowledge Transfer: Throughout the engagement. Every line of code comes with context. Every architectural decision comes with the “why” and the “what’s next.” Big handoffs at the end are a trap, nobody has time for it. We’re successful when you don’t need us anymore, and we make sure that happens by generating small artifacts regularly: commenting complex code, developer READMEs, and architectural decision records.

Let's Talk

Tell us what's keeping you up at night. Send us a note and let's see if we can help: hello@eeeeffkay.com