How we work inside your codebase.
If you’re vetting Shift on behalf of an engineering org, this is the page that answers your questions. Peer-to-peer, real specifics, no marketing.
One named lead, the right one or two engineers behind them.
Led by Ryan Hill, with a vetted bench of 4 senior engineers across different disciplines and backgrounds — backend, infrastructure, AI, and product. Each engagement is staffed with the right one or two for the work, not a fixed pod and not a junior team practicing on your build.
One point of contact.
Ryan is the named lead and primary contact on every engagement. You get one inbox and one calendar — not a rotating cast of account managers.
Senior, vetted, rotated in.
The bench is four senior engineers covering backend, infrastructure, AI, and product. They rotate in for the parts of the build that need their depth, plus second-pair review.
Right brains, not headcount.
Most engagements run with one or two engineers active at a time. We add depth where it changes the outcome, not to inflate the invoice.
One person leaving doesn’t strand your project.
Continuity guarantee.
Ryan is the named lead and the continuity guarantee. If everything else changed, your project would still have its architect.
Overlapping competence.
Bench members are vetted relationships with overlapping competence. Losing one doesn’t leave a hole — it shifts work to the next-best fit.
Documentation in your repo.
Architecture, runbooks, and decision logs live in your repo from week one. If something happened to us, your team would have what they need to keep moving.
Your branch, your review, your CI.
We don’t fork off into a parallel universe. The work shows up where your team already looks for it.
We branch off your default branch. PRs go through your review process, your style guide, and your CI rules. We don’t introduce parallel toolchains.
Linear, Jira, GitHub Projects — whatever you use. Ticket per scoped chunk, linked to the PR, kept current as the work moves.
Your Slack, Teams, or Discord channel. Async-first, weekly demo, blocked-only synchronous. We don’t schedule meetings to fill space.
Commits go in under named author identities so the history is auditable. No shared bot accounts unless you explicitly require it.
The legal stuff, plainly.
IP assignment.
IP is assigned to you as part of the SOW. No exclusivity carve-outs from us, no license-back, no shared-ownership games.
MSAs we’ll sign.
We sign your MSA after a real read. Reasonable indemnification, mutual confidentiality, capped liability — happy to negotiate. No rubber stamp.
SOW per project.
Fixed scope, fixed fee, fixed timeline. Change orders are written and re-quoted before work begins.
W-9 and entity disclosure.
W-9 and business-entity disclosure available on request. Vendor onboarding paperwork is part of the cost of doing business.
Defined, in writing, before the engagement starts.
During the engagement.
We respond within 1 business day to non-prod issues, faster for issues we caused. The expectations are written into the SOW so there’s nothing to negotiate after something breaks.
Production on-call.
We don’t run 24/7 production on-call as a default. If your project needs it, that’s a separate retainer with explicit hours and an explicit escalation path.
Post-handoff.
You own the on-call after handoff. We’re available for paid support windows on request — and the documentation is built so you don’t need us as often as a typical agency would prefer.
We aim to leave, not to embed.
The deliverable isn’t just code — it’s your team’s ability to keep moving without us.
Architecture document and decision log committed to the repo — not a slide deck, not a Notion page that disappears with the engagement.
Runbooks for the systems we built — startup, deploy, common failures, and what to check first when something goes sideways.
One transition session with your team at handoff — recorded if you want it, with time set aside for live questions.
30-day support window included on every engagement for questions and small fixes after the project ships.
What we tend to reach for.
Concrete is comfort food. None of this is a religion — if your stack is reasonable and we’re slotting in, we use yours.
Go and Node/TypeScript. Postgres for the database. Cloud Run, Vercel, and Neon as common deployment defaults.
React, TanStack (Router/Query/Form), Tailwind, and shadcn-style component composition. TypeScript end-to-end.
OpenAI and Anthropic for LLMs. We run evals before we ship. We don’t train models for you — we wire production-ready off-the-shelf models into your workflows.
We pick the stack that fits the problem. If you have an existing stack and it’s reasonable, we work in it — no rip-and-replace just to bill more.
The lines we hold.
No AI features without an eval harness
Anything LLM-shaped ships with a written-down evaluation suite. If we can’t measure whether the model is doing the job, we won’t put it in front of your users.
No black-box deliverables
Architecture docs, runbooks, and a decision log come with the code. If your team can’t read what we built and operate it, we haven’t finished.
No junior-pair engagements against a senior team
If you already have senior engineers and you’re looking for hands, we’re probably not the right fit. We add value when there’s a hard problem or a new shape, not when we’re a slower second seat.
Trust posture in plain English.
How we handle data, access, IP, credentials, subprocessors, and incidents lives on the trust & security page. It’s honest about what is and isn’t in place — including the certifications we don’t have.
Want a 30-minute architecture review?
Bring a real problem. Ryan will give you a straight read on whether we’re a fit, what we’d do, and what we wouldn’t.