Make the safe path the easy path
Secure defaults, repeatable delivery and clear ownership belong in the everyday workflow.
About / Engineering with intent
Good foundations are built with the people who depend on them.
Stratafound Platform Works is an independent engineering consultancy for organisations whose cloud environment has become essential to how they deliver, serve customers and manage risk.
How we think
Make the safe path the easy path.
We treat infrastructure as an enabling product, not an invisible cost centre. Good engineering should make sound decisions easier to repeat and poor defaults harder to inherit.
We start from the operating context, make trade-offs visible, and build in small increments. We leave room for change because organisations, workloads and risk do not stand still.
Our principles
Leave teams more capable
Pairing, maintainable choices and operational context are part of the work, not extras at the end.
Measure what matters
We agree a baseline, track the service or delivery measure that matters, and say when evidence is incomplete.
Design for change
Prefer adaptable boundaries and understandable patterns over brittle assumptions that lock teams in.
Sustainable engineering
Less toil is a design outcome.
We aim to reduce duplicated effort, unnecessary compute and unowned systems. That means choosing the simplest platform pattern that meets the need, checking its operational and cost impact, and retiring what no longer serves the organisation.
Our working model is collaborative and deliberately transparent: accessible decisions, documented changes, and time set aside for maintainers—not just delivery teams.
The team / 12 people, one engineering practice
People who build, explain and hand over.
The Stratafound team brings complementary experience across architecture, cloud security, platform delivery, reliability and client partnership.
Eleanor Whitcombe
Founder & Platform Strategy Director
Eleanor helps leadership teams connect infrastructure decisions to product direction and risk appetite. She favours clear decision records, small proof points and architecture that leaves room for a business to change.
Daniel Mercer
Principal Cloud Architect
Daniel works across cloud boundaries, identity and network design, turning complex requirements into a small set of understandable patterns. He is happiest when a landing zone is secure by default and straightforward to extend.
Priya Nanduri
Head of Platform Engineering
Priya leads platform teams from first developer interviews through to service ownership. Her focus is reducing repeated toil with useful self-service, while keeping the internal platform small enough to maintain with confidence.
Oliver Hargreaves
Reliability Engineering Lead
Oliver helps teams define service objectives, improve incident learning and make telemetry actionable. He has a practical instinct for separating a genuine reliability risk from dashboard noise and alert fatigue.
Amelia Rowe
Cloud Security Architect
Amelia builds security into identity, network and workload design without turning every change into a special case. She translates control requirements into automation and evidence that engineers can use during delivery.
Marcus Ellery
Developer Experience Lead
Marcus studies the steps engineers take to test, deploy and understand a service. He uses those observations to shape clear templates, documentation and feedback loops that improve the everyday developer journey.
Farah Mahmood
Infrastructure Automation Engineer
Farah develops reusable infrastructure modules and guarded delivery workflows. She pays close attention to the awkward edges—state recovery, drift, secrets and safe teardown—that decide whether automation holds up in production.
Thomas Keane
FinOps & Governance Consultant
Thomas connects cloud invoices to accountable teams, products and engineering decisions. He prefers cost conversations grounded in usage patterns and forecast confidence, with governance that helps teams act rather than just explain variance.
Lydia Pembroke
Delivery Director
Lydia brings structure to multi-team engineering programmes without hiding uncertainty behind status theatre. She keeps decisions, dependencies and delivery risks visible, and makes sure the people receiving a platform shape the handover.
Isaac Bennett
Kubernetes Platform Engineer
Isaac builds cluster and workload patterns that make upgrades, tenancy and deployment behaviour understandable. He asks whether Kubernetes is the right tool first, then makes the operational path explicit for the teams using it.
Harriet Cole
Observability Specialist
Harriet helps service owners decide which signals matter and how they should respond. Her work connects instrumentation, dashboards and alerts to real user journeys, so teams can see impact without searching through a wall of graphs.
Nathaniel Brooks
Client Partnerships Lead
Nathaniel keeps client relationships grounded in clear expectations, useful conversations and honest progress. He connects the right specialists to each challenge and helps both sides understand when a piece of work is ready to hand over.
A good first conversation can be the start of a better platform.
Talk directly with an engineer about where delivery gets stuck, what needs to change and how to make the next step manageable.
Meet us at the problem