01
Senior, or we don't staff it
No bench-warmers, no juniors learning on your dime. Every engineer we place has shipped the same shape of work before — usually multiple times. Average years of experience: 7+.
About
A small team of
stubborn seniors.
We are a software consultancy run by engineers, not account managers. Every name on the team page below is on the work — not selling it.
§ 01 — History
A short history, honestly.
Delta Studio started the way most useful consultancies do: with a small group of senior engineers being asked to fix something nobody else wanted to touch.
The first engagement was a six-week rescue of a payments system that had been in "two more weeks" mode for fourteen months. We shipped it in seven. Word spread, more work came in, and at some point we stopped calling it a side project.
The shape we settled on — three engagement modes, all-senior staffing, written estimates and working software at every review — was less of a strategy than the obvious response to the failures we'd seen at every previous shop. We made the rules out of bruises.
Today we run lean: a small core team across London, Lisbon, and Berlin, plus a slightly larger network of senior contractors we've worked alongside for years. We staff projects from that pool, not from a bench. If we can't put the right person on your work, we'll say so.
§ 02 — Standards
Six things we won't budge on.
The standards we hold ourselves to. They make us harder to work with sometimes. They also make us harder to replace.
02
Working software at every review
No demos that fall apart in production. The first review of any engagement is a deployable build, even if it does almost nothing. We pay for the credibility tax up front.
03
You can fire any engineer, any time
No replacement fees, no notice period beyond a respectful handover. The same goes the other way — if a fit isn't working, we'll say so first.
04
We document as we go
Architecture decisions, API contracts, runbooks. Every PR explains the why, not just the what. The goal is that a stranger can take over from us in a week.
05
Estimates are written, not waved
No "two-week" hand-waves. Every estimate over 5 days is a written breakdown with risks priced in. We adjust when the work changes shape — but we don't silently slip.
06
Handover is a deliverable, not a courtesy
A handover is a week, a written document, and a 30-day warranty on anything we shipped. We want to be re-hired, not missed.
§ 03 — Team
Who you'll actually meet.
A slice of the people who'll be in your standup. Not a sales team — every name here is hands-on the work.
Sarmad Ali
Founder · Engineering
15 years shipping product at scale-ups and the Big Five. Now spends most of his time keeping the team unblocked.
Maya Lindberg
Partner · Design
Product designer who can cut a figma file open in dev-tools and not flinch. Previously at Figma and Linear.
Ravi Naidu
Principal Engineer
Distributed systems and platform; survived the Stripe of 2017 and the Twilio of 2020. Mentors most of our seniors.
Ines Cabral
Engineering Lead
Mobile and React Native. Shipped to 14 countries before she'd had her morning coffee. Lisbon-based.
Tobias Werner
Staff Engineer · Cloud
Cloud and CI. Has reduced more AWS bills than he's grown them. Ex-AWS solutions architect.
Aoife Brennan
Delivery Lead
Keeps engagements honest. Will tell you when you don't need us. Eight years running embedded squads.
Chen Wei
Senior Engineer · AI
LLM evals, retrieval, agentic workflows. Will not ship a feature without a fallback path.
Joaquim Ribeiro
Senior Engineer · Web
TypeScript everywhere, Postgres always, performance budgets enforced in CI. Lisbon, like Ines.
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Have a thing that
needs shipping?
Tell us the shape of the problem. We'll write back within a working day with an honest read — fit, no fit, or a second question.