We're a hands-on engineering consultancy

Ironleaf brings together senior platform architects, reliability engineers, DevOps specialists, and security experts who have built and operated infrastructure at scale. We work directly alongside your teams—no junior-only engagements, no templates.

Our story

Ironleaf started because we saw a pattern: ambitious US technology companies hit a wall around $100M in revenue or 50-100 engineers. Their cloud infrastructure, deployment practices, and observability systems—fine when they were smaller—become fragile, expensive, and slow.

They'd hire great engineers and ask them to solve infrastructure problems. But those engineers were hired to build products, not operate platforms. The company would limp along with manual deployments, alert storms, and firefighting.

We realized these companies didn't need traditional consulting—they needed experienced platform engineers who could work alongside their teams, ship real infrastructure, and leave them in a better position. That's what Ironleaf does.

We're not an outsourcing shop. We don't parachute in, write a report, and leave. We design and build, then teach your teams to own and evolve what we've created. We measure success by how much faster and more confidently your teams ship—and how much less toil they experience.

How we work

Pragmatic engineering

We solve the problems you have today, not the ones you might have in five years. We favor boring, well-tested approaches over cutting-edge tooling.

Hands-on partnership

Senior engineers work alongside your team, not separate from them. You learn as we build. Knowledge transfer happens in real time.

Ownership mindset

We design systems your teams can own. We document everything, establish runbooks, and ensure you don't depend on us forever.

No disruption by default

We modernize incrementally. You don't stop shipping product while we work. We build in parallel and cutover gradually.

Honest feedback

If something won't work, we tell you. If there's a cheaper or faster path, we recommend it. You're our stakeholder, not a checkbox.

Respect for your team

Your engineers are smart. We respect their time, ask good questions, and share context generously rather than dictate solutions.

The team

Eleanor Grant

Founder & Principal Platform Architect

Eleanor founded Ironleaf after 15 years as a principal engineer at a hyperscale cloud company. She led platform teams through multiple infrastructure transformations and has deep expertise in governance, cost optimization, and multi-cloud architecture. Eleanor partners with founders and CTOs to architect digital foundations for ambitious growth.

Marcus Bell

Director of Cloud Engineering

Marcus brings 12 years of AWS and GCP experience from infrastructure-as-code through multi-region operations. He's led teams building landing zones for financial services and healthcare organizations, with deep expertise in compliance architecture, network design, and cost governance. Marcus is dedicated to making infrastructure boring and reliable.

Priya Nanduri

Head of Reliability Engineering

Priya has spent a decade reducing toil and building observability systems at scale. She designed alert and escalation frameworks for high-frequency trading platforms and helped teams reduce MTTR by 60%. Priya specializes in alert rationalization, SLO definition, incident response readiness, and blameless culture.

Daniel Whitaker

Principal DevOps Consultant

Daniel pioneered CI/CD practices at a rapidly scaling SaaS company where he reduced deployment lead time from 3 weeks to 2 hours. He's architected pipelines for hundreds of engineering teams and specializes in release safety, environment strategy, and database migration automation. Daniel believes great deployments should be boring.

Sofia Bennett

Cloud Security Lead

Sofia designed IAM frameworks and security automation for PCI-DSS, HIPAA, and SOC 2 regulated environments. She's built policy-as-code systems that allow teams to move fast while staying secure and compliant. Sofia advocates for security as infrastructure—automated, measurable, and built into every layer.

Noah Kline

Platform Product Strategist

Noah helps teams think about platform engineering as product—with users, adoption metrics, and feedback loops. He's built developer portals that increased team velocity by 40% and led internal platform strategy for a 200-person engineering organization. Noah bridges product thinking and infrastructure engineering.

Amelia Rhodes

Senior Infrastructure Engineer

Amelia has built and operated Kubernetes clusters serving millions of requests daily. She's an expert in cluster architecture, node optimization, workload placement, and storage systems. Amelia is passionate about making Kubernetes accessible to teams who need it without the operational burden of learning every detail.

Julian Foster

Kubernetes Practice Lead

Julian led Kubernetes adoption for a company growing from 0 to 5,000 pods in 18 months. He specializes in container security, service mesh architecture, and helping teams avoid common Kubernetes pitfalls. Julian believes Kubernetes should be invisible infrastructure that lets developers focus on shipping products.

Hannah Cole

Developer Experience Director

Hannah designs internal developer experiences that delight engineers. She's built self-service platforms and dashboards that increased team autonomy while reducing platform team burden. Hannah focuses on onboarding, documentation, and making infrastructure approachable for all skill levels.

Owen Mercer

Client Delivery Lead

Owen ensures every engagement at Ironleaf delivers impact on schedule. He manages discovery, coordinates across teams, and keeps stakeholders aligned on progress. Owen's background includes scaling operations at a 100+ person consulting firm where he learned how to balance client needs with team capacity.

Working with us

We typically work directly with CTOs, VP Engineering, or infrastructure leadership. Engagement scope and timeline vary, but most projects run 8-14 weeks with a team of 1-3 engineers working part- or full-time.

We collaborate closely with your product, security, and operations teams. We don't work in isolation—we understand your constraints, business goals, and team dynamics. We integrate with your existing tools and processes rather than forcing new ones.

The best engagements happen when you want hands-on partnership and are willing to have direct conversations about tradeoffs and priorities. If you're looking for rubber-stamp consulting or a statement of work that's so rigid it breaks the first time reality intrudes, we're probably not the right fit.

Let's Talk