Building The Modern Technology Stack
Logic is not legacy.
Your deterministic, symbolic workflows are still the foundation and core infrastructure of your operations.
Logic is live, in production and it is still evolving.
Neural / ML done better.
Your AI should be faster, cheaper, private and suited to your needs.
We embrace neural and ML workflows, and we want to see them done right.
Let us bring you up to speed.
Four levels of integration.
Logical and neural components meet at different depths in different businesses. We work at all four.
- 00
Desk Level
AI is not in your primary workflows.
It sits on desktops, with your devops and business teams. We bring twenty years of on-prem, cloud-native and hybrid delivery in audited environments.
- 01
Stack Level
Isolated ML that needs managing.
Models to integrate into your devops processes. We use local inference and right-powered models to control cost and show you where the spend goes.
- 02
Graph Level
Symbolic and neural, interleaved.
Complex workflows, agentic processes and loops. We help with orchestration tooling, design, deployment and cost monitoring.
- 03
Model Level
The model itself is the work.
Hyperparameter tuning, training and the data science around them. We and our partners take this on.
Production grade, at scale, on the clock.
Regulated finance, live broadcast, elite sport and global education. Systems where the volume is real, the deadline belongs to somebody else, and there is no quiet window in which to put things right.
- Experience
- 25+
- Scale
- 10+ PB
- Latency
- <10ms
- Assembly
- Weeks
- Audited
- 20 yrs
- Clients
- 40+
Years designing and operating production systems
Media archive migrated for a global sports organisation
Timing data captured and distributed live at a world championship
To a working team in place, against 3–6 months to hire one in
On-prem, cloud-native and hybrid delivery in regulated environments
Startups and scale-ups engaged
The team is part of the stack.
A stack is not only hardware and software. It is the people, the processes and the culture that keep it alive. So the question is never just what gets built, it is who is going to run it, and whether they still can in a year.
Assembled in weeks
People
A broad technical network and long recruiter relationships mean a team can be in place in weeks, against the three to six months a senior hire takes in search, fees and risk. Pre-vetted, not pre-paid: nobody sits idle on your invoice.
Written down, not remembered
Processes
Runbooks, review, on-call, the release rhythm, and increasingly the agents running parts of it. The unglamorous machinery that decides whether the platform still works in a year, and whether anyone can operate it without the person who built it.
Built on purpose
Culture
How a team decides what good looks like, and whether that holds when the deadline is real and immovable. It is the part nobody writes into a statement of work, and the part that determines whether the other two survive contact with pressure.
Hardware and software are the easy half to buy. For a company counting runway, every month spent searching for a senior engineer is a month of burn against a roadmap that has not moved, and a platform nobody has learned to run yet.
What we are thinking about.
Method notes and arguments from the work, written up while they are still fresh enough to be useful.
- Essay2 min read
Introducing Kojak the RAG Stack
Kojak is a open-source tool to show how RAG actually works. Using open-weight models and minimal infrastructure, we want to lower the barrier to understanding and entry to these tools.
Read article - Case study3 min read
Learning platforms for Inkstone
How we built and evolved a custom learning platform family for an Auckland EdTech business, from legacy Drupal stack to a multi-tenant, enterprise-grade system serving Japan's top professional firms.
Read article - Case study1 min read
Edge-processing of timing data at the World Track Cycling Championships
How we built a real-time edge processing pipeline to capture, validate and distribute single-digit-millisecond timing data across a live international cycling championship.
Read article
Have a hard data problem worth solving properly?
Palefire takes a small number of engagements each quarter. If you need a partner to design a platform, make sense of the data already in it, or make an AI system trustworthy enough to ship, start with an email.
- rdd@palefire.io
- Studio
- London · Remote worldwide