Four engineers in San Francisco in 2016, tired of watching strategy decks get handed to offshore delivery teams who had never met the client. Nine years later there are 210 of us, and we still write the code.
Most of our engagements arrive after something else has failed. A rewrite cancelled twice. An AI prototype nobody will sign off. A migration three vendors have called impossible without a cutover weekend.
We take them because the failure is usually not technical. It is that nobody established what the system actually does before trying to replace it, or built a way to measure whether the replacement was working. Both are solvable, and both are unglamorous.
That shapes how we are built. Permanent employees rather than subcontractors, so knowledge stays. Written architecture decisions, so reasoning outlives the people who made it. And a weekly risk register that goes to the client unedited, because the only surprises worth having are pleasant ones.
These are not posters. Each one has cost us a pitch, and each one is why clients keep us for years.
If the plan will not work, you hear it in week one, not at the retrospective. Uncomfortable honesty is cheaper than a comfortable surprise.
We measure ourselves on whether the system works in production under real load, not on whether the tickets closed.
Every engagement ends with your team more capable than when we arrived. If you still need us, we have failed at part of the job.
Someone will debug this at 3am. Every architectural decision gets weighed against that moment.
We have grown slowly and on purpose. Every office opened because clients in that region needed delivery in their own timezone, not because growth looked good on a slide.
Four engineers, one client, and a conviction that consultancies had stopped writing code.
Replaced a 22-year-old logistics mainframe for a Fortune 500 shipper without a cutover freeze.
EMEA delivery hub opened to serve European financial services clients in-region.
Certified, and the practice became a service line after clients kept asking how we did it.
APAC delivery and a dedicated engineering hub took the team past 120 people.
Formed around evaluation and retrieval rather than demos. First production RAG system shipped that March.
Across 42 countries, with a 96% retention rate and 210 people on staff.
No black boxes and no status theatre. Every stage has named deliverables and a duration we commit to at kickoff, and the risk register goes to you weekly whether or not the news is good.
We interview your team, read your code and map the constraints nobody wrote down. You get a clear-eyed assessment, including the parts you may not want to hear.
Decisions get made and written down. Every significant trade-off becomes an architecture decision record, so the reasoning outlives the people who made it.
Interaction design and a tokenised system, prototyped in code. We test with real users before a single production component gets written.
Two-week iterations, demoed live. The pipeline, tests and observability go in with the first feature, not at the end.
Progressive rollout behind flags, with a rehearsed rollback. We sit with your on-call rota through the first two weeks of real traffic.
We hand over properly — documentation, pairing and a support period — then stay available under an SLA for as long as you want us.
Engagements typically run 14–32 weeks end to end. Programmes run longer and follow the same structure per workstream.
Delivery happens in your working hours. Every engagement has a squad whose day overlaps with yours by at least six hours.
San Francisco
Headquarters
500 Howard Street, Suite 900, CA 94105
United States · PST
London
EMEA Delivery
1 Finsbury Avenue, EC2M 2PF
United Kingdom · GMT
Singapore
APAC Delivery
9 Straits View, Marina One, 018937
Singapore · SGT
Lahore
Engineering Hub
Arfa Software Technology Park, 54000
Pakistan · PKT
We take on a limited number of engagements each quarter, and we are hiring across all four offices.
hello@cymbiote.com