A structured review that maps your system's real constraints — before they become incidents.
Delivered by engineers with 100+ years combined architecture experience
Architecture risk compounds silently — by the time it surfaces as an incident, remediation is expensive and urgent.
This engagement fits when:
Warning signs
Incidents with unclear root causes
Scaling anxiety before traffic events
Dependencies nobody fully mapped
Architecture decisions made 2+ years ago, never revisited
We map the major components, services, and boundaries as they exist today.
We model how your architecture would behave under growth — identifying structural ceilings and bottlenecks at 2x, 5x, and 10x before you hit them.
We analyze how your architecture handles failure at the design level: circuit breaker patterns, retry strategies, graceful degradation paths.
Every structural risk is identified, documented, and ranked by severity and probability. You get a prioritised list with a clear starting point.
Questions we answer
Which components are tightly coupled to constrain future changes?
Where are the hidden dependencies nobody mapped?
What are the bottlenecks at 5x and 10x load?
Which structural risks have the highest probability of becoming incidents?
What's the remediation priority when you can't fix everything at once?
Are your AI components observable, testable, and replaceable or are they black boxes in your architecture?
Yes. AI components are reviewed like any other service boundary: how they're integrated, what happens when they fail, whether they can be observed and replaced. We look at inference serving, dependency coupling, fallback behavior, and cost visibility.
A code review looks at implementation: syntax, patterns, whether a function does what it says. Today AI tools handle most of this. An architecture review looks at structure like how services talk to each other, where are the hidden dependencies, what breaks first at load spike or a service failure? We examine the decisions that shape how the whole system behaves under stress.
One to two weeks post getting access. That includes reviewing documentation, discussions with your engineers, running the analysis, and delivering findings. The written report arrives within that window.
Read-only access to your infrastructure, codebase, whatever architecture documentation exists, and about a couple of hours total from your engineers for information gathering. After that, we work independently while your team keeps shipping. Every engagement is confidential, we sign an NDA if you prefer.
The review produces a prioritized risk register and a remediation roadmap. We tell you what to fix, in what order, and roughly how long each fix takes. If you want us to do the fixing, that's a separate engagement. Many clients use the review to decide what they'll handle internally and what to bring us back for.
A senior architect will review your situation and recommend the right starting point.