sortum is a small studio of engineers who've shipped systems to production and stayed on-call for them. that perspective — operating, not advising — is the only thing on the page.
the people on every call are the people writing the code. no juniors handed your work over coffee, no offshore back-channel, no "associate principal" titles attached to non-technical reps.
that constraint puts a hard ceiling on how many briefs we can take. it also puts a hard floor on what we can promise.
four operating principles. each one earned by getting it wrong somewhere first.
engineers who've shipped to production write differently than people who've only diagrammed it. every recommendation we make is anchored in something we've watched fail at 3am.
queues, retries, idempotency, secret rotation, eval harnesses, on-call runbooks. the unglamorous infrastructure is most of what separates a demo from a system that survives a year in production.
we don't widen the surface area of a system until the first slice has a number on the wall. if the first slice doesn't pay for itself, the second one won't either.
no subcontracting, no offshore back-channel. the 2–3 people on the kickoff call are the same names that show up in git blame six months later.
a flashy prototype is easy. a system that survives peak load with grounded answers and a paging on-call is engineering. observability, retries, evals and security from day zero, not from incident #1.
the people on the kickoff call are the same people writing the code. no juniors handed your work over coffee. small team, deep stakes.
we prefer scoped phases with a clear deliverable over open retainers. retainers come later, once we have shared evidence the system pays for itself.
if a brief looks better solved by a $40/mo saas, we tell you. our reputation lives downstream of the calls we walked away from, not the ones we sold into.
full case studies live on /portfolio. reference calls available on request under nda. attributions land here as clients sign off.
"replaced a 4-person research desk with an agent that runs multi-source briefs in 12 minutes."
"inbound + outbound voice agent qualifying leads and booking demos. clean handoff to humans on intent."
"tier-1 deflection without hallucinated policy answers across six months in production."
reply within 48 business hours for qualified briefs.