When you need it
Your engineers make architecture decisions every week, and nobody senior reviews them. A full-time principal architect is hard to justify and harder to find.
What sets the quote
- Sized by the architect days you need each month, typically 1 to 4, planned in advance.
- 1 day a month: one platform or product team, a monthly architecture review and decision-record reviews.
- 2 days a month: up to 3 teams, plus a platform and guardrail backlog worked through with your engineers.
- 4 days a month: up to 6 teams across cloud, identity and AI, plus hands-on design work.
- Minimum term of three months, then one month's notice.
What changes
- Architecture decisions are written down and reviewed before they become expensive to change.
- Your platform and guardrail backlog moves every month, not only after an incident.
- Your leadership gets a plain-language view of platform risk and progress every quarter.
What you get
- An agreed number of senior architect days each month, planned with you in advance
- A seat on your architecture board, or help to set one up
- Reviews of architecture decision records and major designs
- A platform and guardrail backlog, prioritised and worked through with your team
- A monthly written summary of decisions, open risks and next steps
- A quarterly review of platform risk, cost and roadmap for your leadership
A senior architect leads the retainer; vetted specialists join for hands-on work when the scope needs them, quoted separately. We play this role for Rayna Tours and TechnoHeaven.
Not included
- On-call or incident response (available as 24/7 on-call, added to a care plan)
- Hands-on build work beyond the agreed days (quoted separately as a package or sprint)
- Managing your staff or making hiring decisions
- Security programme work such as customer security questionnaires and policy upkeep (offered as the fractional security architect)
What we need from you
- One named contact who sets priorities with us each month.
- Read access to your repositories and ticket system, and read-only cloud access: AWS ViewOnlyAccess, Azure Reader or Google Cloud Viewer.
- An invitation to your architecture board and to the channels where decisions are discussed.
How it works
Free 30-minute call, then a written fixed monthly quote.
First month: a short review of your architecture, risks and open decisions, and an agreed backlog.
Every month: architecture board, decision reviews and backlog work on the agreed days.
Every quarter: a risk and roadmap review with your leadership, and a reset of priorities.
At a glance
- Duration
- Monthly
- Price
- Fixed quote after a free 30-minute call
- Delivered by
- Our lead architect
Related work
Rayna Tours
Moving production out of an impaired cloud region
When the AWS region running a travel booking platform was disrupted, production ran on a recovery stack within about a day, and the whole platform moved to a new region within about a month.
- ~1 day
- to run production on a recovery stack
- ~36 h
- to rebuild the shared services as code
Rayna Tours and TechnoHeaven
From one legacy account to a governed multi-account AWS platform
A multi-account AWS foundation for a travel group's twenty or so services, with guardrails, keyless pipelines and a temporary environment for every pull request, all defined in Terraform.
- 8
- AWS accounts in one organisation
- 40+
- Terraform repositories
Related services
Architecture call
A 90-minute working session with a senior architect on one hard architecture question, followed by a written memo with the recommendation and next steps within three working days.
Technology decision papers
A written recommendation on a platform choice that is expensive to reverse, such as Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, an identity platform, an AI platform or a cloud, with licensing and costs worked out.
Cloud and digital roadmap
A review of your cloud, your workplace platform and your applications over three weeks, ending in a 12-month roadmap with effort and cost ranges, and one presentation to your board.