System Architecture

A full-time architect makes sense when you have 15+ engineers and complex, ongoing architectural decisions. For earlier-stage companies, architecture consulting gives you access to a broad range of patterns and trade-off experience that a single full-time hire may not have: especially for AI, data architecture, and multi-cloud decisions. Many clients use us to define the architecture and the ADR library, then hire a full-time architect to execute and own it.

Both. We run architecture sprints that include the CTO or VP Engineering for alignment and the lead engineers for technical depth. The output, ADRs, C4 diagrams, and the technology selection report, is designed to be useful at both levels.

An ADR is a short document that captures a significant architectural decision: the context that drove it, the options that were considered, the decision that was made, and the trade-offs that were accepted. ADRs matter because they prevent the same debate happening twice, help new engineers understand why things are built the way they are, and create a paper trail of intentional decisions vs accidental accumulation.

We use a staged review approach. First, we do a high-level architecture map using C4 at the context and container level, interviews with team leads, and analysis of deployment and incident history. This identifies the highest-risk areas. We then dive deeper into those areas in subsequent sessions, rather than trying to document everything upfront. The output is prioritised by blast radius and remediation cost.

Architecture without requirements is guesswork. We always start with a requirements discovery session covering: expected scale (users, data volume, transaction rate), team size and skills, compliance requirements, time-to-market constraints, and cost envelope. With those inputs, we can produce an architecture recommendation that fits your actual constraints rather than an ideal-world blueprint that can't be built.