Skip to content Work with usProofWritingAbout Book a call

Senior engineering, built to ship.

Accessible design systems, architecture, and AI — by the hour, from the engineer who built HELiX. A deliberately short client list.

Do we have chemistry? See how we work
Missing Elements

You don't have an engineering problem.
You have a 'wrong decision compounding at interest' problem.

The teams quietly winning right now aren't faster — they have someone who's already pattern-matched against this exact failure mode and intervened before it became a six-month rewrite.

  • Tech Debt

    Technical debt is compounding faster than it's being paid down — and nobody has the mandate to stop it.

  • Knowledge Bottleneck

    One engineer understands the auth layer. They updated their LinkedIn twice this month.

  • AI Reliability

    Your LLM integration hallucinates on 40% of edge cases. The vendor says that's expected.

  • Scope Clarity

    Every PR touches something that breaks something else, and nobody can explain why.

  • Vendor Expertise

    Three consultants. Three completely different answers. Zero production evidence.

  • Inference Cost

    Inference costs quadrupled in 60 days. Nobody on the team has a remediation plan.

The Table

Design systems and accessibility, first. The rest of the stack behind them.

Seven disciplines, senior-delivered across the board. We lead with accessible design-system engineering; the supporting disciplines are here when the work reaches them.

See how we work
What we do

What we do, and how to hire us.

We build and audit accessible design systems, and we sell the senior time behind them by the hour. The front door is the rate card; the deeper engagements are scoped and capped up front.

How to hire us Senior time, by the hour We publish what we charge — $175 to $300 an hour by discipline, time-and-materials with a cap on every engagement. Start with a call; we scope the work and confirm the fit before anyone signs anything.
See the rates
Work with us See the proof
Reaction Sequence

No mystery. No bureaucracy.

Four steps from "we have a problem" to senior engineers working on it.

  1. Tell us what's on fire — or what's starting to smell like smoke

    No intake forms. No RFP theater. Tell us what's actually happening, what decisions got made, and what the stakes are.

  2. We respond within one business day

    A direct answer: yes we can help and here's what it looks like — or an honest explanation of why we're not the right fit.

  3. 30-minute call. Actual signal, no discovery theater

    We'll ask the questions that matter. You'll get a read on our thinking before any money changes hands.

  4. Clear scope in plain English. Work begins.

    A small senior team — principal-led, with a recurring bench of vetted specialists pulled in by discipline. The engineers you meet are the engineers who do the work. No junior hand-offs.

Open Source

The tools behind the work.

Enterprise web components and agentic governance — built by us, open to everyone.

HELiX

Enterprise Web Component Library

An expansive web component library built to WCAG 2.2 AA with an AAA-bucket floor. Healthcare-first accessibility. Framework-agnostic. Zero lock-in.

rea

Agentic Governance for Claude Code

MCP gateway with a layered middleware chain. Hardened hooks. Stateless Codex review. Hash-chained audit. Autonomy ceilings (L0–L3). One command to install in any repository.
Portrait of Jake Strawn
Who you'd be working with

Jake Strawn

Founder & Principal Engineer

Twenty-five years building production systems, from discovery through delivery. A deliberately short client list — senior engineers only, no juniors, no hand-offs.

Read the full profile
Catalyze

Start the reaction.

Every week without the right technical call is debt compounding at interest. The conversation costs 30 minutes. The alternative costs quarters.

Start a conversation

Response within 1 business day · No commitment required