About
A small team of engineers who have already run your worst-case scenario.
Northstack exists because too many cloud programs are sold by people who will never touch the terminal. Every person here has carried a pager for systems where downtime made headlines.
Who you are actually hiring
Every client name on this site is withheld under NDA. That makes it fair to ask who is behind it.
Eleven years on the platform side of other people’s production systems. Microsoft and GitHub showed me what platform engineering looks like when the platform is the product and the users are engineers who will tell you exactly what is wrong with it. SoftwareOne and Crayon showed me the other version: six weeks, someone else’s estate, and a budget that was committed before anyone looked at the architecture.
In between there were startups, where the platform team is one person who is also the on-call rotation and the one explaining the cloud bill. That is where the FinOps instinct came from. Nothing teaches you where money leaks like watching it drain a runway you are personally counting.
Northstack exists because the same three problems kept turning up regardless of company size: nobody owns the platform, the release process is slower than anyone admits, and roughly a third of the cloud bill buys nothing. All three are fixable in weeks rather than quarters, and none of them get fixed by the vendor who sold you the licences.
Track record
- Eleven years across platform engineering, cloud infrastructure and developer tooling
- Microsoft and GitHub — platform and developer infrastructure teams
- SoftwareOne and Crayon — enterprise Azure consulting
- Multiple startups as the entire platform function: architecture, delivery and the pager
- Azure and AWS in production — landing zones, AKS and EKS, CI/CD, and cost control
Built by engineers from the teams behind
- Azure subscriptions migrated with zero downtime
- 0
Azure subscriptions migrated with zero downtime
- production incidents resolved on 24/7 live-site duty
- 0+
production incidents resolved on 24/7 live-site duty
- average time-to-acknowledge under strict SLAs
- 0.0 min
average time-to-acknowledge under strict SLAs
- platform improvements shipped, not just tickets closed
- 0+
platform improvements shipped, not just tickets closed
Real numbers from enterprise programs our engineers led. Client names under NDA — verifiable on request.
Principles
The principles behind every engagement
Production is the only benchmark
Slide decks don’t page anyone at 3 a.m. Everything we recommend, we have run in production at enterprise scale — and we staff engagements only with people who have carried a pager.
Leave the client stronger
Every engagement ends with your team able to run what we built. Documentation, runbooks and enablement are deliverables, not afterthoughts. Dependency on us is a bug, not a feature.
Security is not a phase
We don’t bolt security on at the end. Guardrails, least privilege and auditability are built into every pipeline, platform and AI workload from the first commit.
Say the uncomfortable thing
If the honest answer is “you don’t need us for this,” that’s the answer you get. Long-term trust beats short-term billables — it’s also better business.
Operating model
How we work
We reply within one business day
A senior engineer — the kind who will actually work on your project — reviews your message and responds with clarifying questions or a call slot.
A 30-minute scoping call
We dig into your stack, your pain and your goals. If we’re not the right fit, we say so and point you somewhere better.
Your free audit begins
We agree the audit scope in writing and deliver findings with a prioritized action plan within five business days.
Want this level of rigor on your platform?
Get a free, fixed-scope platform audit — findings and a prioritized action plan in five business days. We take 3 new engagements per quarter; the audit reserves your spot.