About the studio

Sixteen people who would rather be right than agreeable

Brainfullstack was founded in 2019 by three engineers who had spent a decade repairing other people’s data platforms. We build production systems and stay on call for them, which is the single fact that shapes everything else about how we work.

Founded: 2019
Team: 16 people
Base: San Francisco, California
Model: One team, no departments

Mission

Deliver AI, data, product and automation as one engineering system, so clients stop paying the integration tax of three vendors who have never met.

Vision

That production-grade becomes the default rather than the upgrade. Most software fails in the parts nobody demos, and those parts are learnable.

How we are built

One team, no departments. Engineers speak to clients directly, designers read production logs, and nobody is handed a specification to implement blindly.

AI systems in production

Shipped and still running, not proofs of concept.

40-60%

Manual work removed

Typical reduction per automated process.

99.98%

Pipeline success rate

Across every system we operate.

11,400

Staff hours returned

To client teams over the last year.

Principles

Six rules we actually apply

Not values on a wall. Each of these has cost us money at least once, which is the only real test of whether a principle is held.

Measure before you build

A project that cannot state its baseline cannot prove it worked. We establish the number we intend to move before we write code, even when that delays the start.

Ship in increments that run

Every two weeks something is deployed to a real environment. Progress you cannot open in a browser is not progress, it is an estimate.

Write down the decision

Architecture decisions carry the alternatives considered and the reason for the choice. In eighteen months that record is worth more than the code it explains.

Own the boring half

Retries, backfills, migrations, alerting, on-call. The demo is the easy part, and the difference between a prototype and a system is entirely in the parts nobody demos.

Optimise for removal

We build so you can replace us. Your repositories, your infrastructure, your credentials, and a handover where your team has already shipped changes on their own.

Say the unwelcome thing early

If the scope is wrong, the deadline is not real, or the project should not happen, you hear it in week one. That conversation is cheaper than the alternative every single time.

Story

Seven years, one idea

That the difference between a prototype and a system is entirely in the parts nobody demos.

2019
Founded
Three engineers who had spent a decade repairing other people's data platforms decided to build them correctly the first time instead.
2021
First managed systems
Clients asked us to keep operating what we had built. Running our own work on call permanently changed how we design it.
2023
The AI practice
We shipped our first production LLM system and learned, expensively, that the model was never the hard part. The evaluation harness became standard on every engagement after that.
2025
Sixteen people
Still one team rather than departments. Engineers talk to clients, designers read production logs, and nobody is handed a specification to implement blindly.

Team

The people who do the building

Every engagement is staffed by the people you meet in the first call. We do not run a sales team that hands you to a delivery team.

Elena Vasquez

Founder, Principal Engineer

Distributed systems and data platforms. Spent a decade repairing pipelines before deciding to build them properly.

Daniel Okonkwo

Founder, Principal Engineer

Applied machine learning and evaluation. Believes most AI projects fail at measurement rather than modelling.

Mei Tanaka

Head of Product Engineering

Web performance and design systems. Has never met a bundle she could not halve.

Rafael Costa

Principal Data Engineer

Warehousing, semantic layers and the unglamorous work of making two dashboards agree.

Hannah Berger

Design Lead

Interface and systems design. Works in the repository, not only in the design file.

Yusuf Demir

Head of Reliability

On-call, incident response and the argument that hardening is a phase, not an afterthought.

Next step

Tell us what you are building.

A system you want built, a model that has to survive real traffic, or a process that should have been automated a year ago. The first conversation costs nothing, and occasionally ends with us telling you not to build it.

Start a projecthello@brainfullstack.com

Reply within one working day

A person, not an autoresponder.

A 30-minute call, no deck

We ask about constraints, not budget.

A written view within a week

Including the case for not proceeding.