Data platforms

Volume and velocity break platforms quietly.

Nothing falls over on the day it stops being fit for purpose. It gets slower, then it gets expensive, then one quarter the roadmap is entirely about the platform. Palefire designs, builds and runs data platforms for demanding, high-volume, high-velocity environments, hands-on from the first whiteboard session through to production and well past it.

  • Storage, movement and access at scale
  • Real-time and event-driven by design
  • Built to be operated, not just delivered
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What we build

The layer everything else stands on.

Architecture and build

AWS-native, serverless where it earns its place, event-driven where the problem is genuinely event-shaped. Designed hands-on from the first whiteboard session through to production, for the volume you will have rather than the volume you have today.

  • AWS cloud architecture
  • Serverless and event-driven
  • Storage, movement and access design

High-volume, high-velocity pipelines

Real-time and streaming ingest, media-scale movement, and access patterns that hold their shape under load. The work behind this has run in live broadcast, elite sport and regulated finance, where the deadline is the event itself.

  • Real-time and streaming ingest
  • Petabyte-scale migration
  • Latency-sensitive access patterns

Built to be operated

A platform is not finished when it works, it is finished when a team can run it without you. That means runbooks, observability, an operating rhythm and, where it helps, the people to staff it. Handover is designed in from the start, not improvised at the end.

  • Runbooks and observability
  • Operating rhythm and on-call
  • Handover to the team that inherits it
Track record

Production-grade, at scale, under pressure.

The work spans regulated finance, live broadcast, elite sport and global education. Always with real stakes, always in production, usually with a deadline that could not move because it was an event happening in front of an audience.

Track record

Production-grade, at scale, under pressure.

The work spans regulated finance, live broadcast, elite sport, and global education. Always with real stakes, always in production.

Experience
25+

Years designing and operating production systems

Clients
40+

Startups and scale-ups engaged since 2006

Scale
10+ PB

Media archive migrated for a global sports organisation

Latency
<10ms

Timing data captured and distributed live at a world championship

How it starts

A scoped first step, not an open-ended retainer.

Engagements are led directly by Rudolph: no hand-off to juniors, no account management layer. Where senior leadership is what you actually need, that includes architecture strategy and talking straight to your board and investors about the trade-offs.

  1. Week 0

    A conversation, not a pitch

    What you are trying to build, what is currently in the way, and whether this is a problem worth paying us to look at. Sometimes the answer is no, and that is a faster call than most people expect.

  2. Weeks 1 to 4

    A scoped assessment

    A fixed-price, fixed-length look at the platform as it stands: architecture, cost profile, the failure modes waiting to happen, and what it would take to run this in a year. You get a written document and a prioritised set of options.

  3. After that

    Build, lead, or hand back

    If the work is worth doing we build it, and assemble the team around it where you need one. If it is not, you keep the assessment and take it to whoever you like. Nothing here depends on us being in the room next quarter.

Is the platform the thing slowing you down?

If the roadmap keeps getting eaten by infrastructure, or you are about to put a great deal of load on something that has never seen it, that is worth an hour of conversation before it is worth a quarter of engineering.

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Email
rdd@palefire.io
Studio
London  ·  Remote worldwide