A senior in the room,without the senior hire.
For PHP/Laravel teams of 3–30 developers. A two-week, fixed-price Engineering Reset installs the process, CI and review your team is missing — then, if you want, a fractional lead keeps it honest for six hours a week. Not sure where it hurts? A one-week Delivery Health Audit shows you, from your own Jira and Bitbucket data.
It's the loop we run on our own products: AI agents plan, build, test and review; a human approves. Read the free playbook →
Who it's for
Hiring a senior, hoping for a lead
You need someone to set the standard, not just close tickets.
Taking a legacy platform in-house
An external partner built it; now your team has to own it.
Releases are scary
No CI, thin tests, and every deploy is a held breath.
If you already have mature CI, review and tests, you probably don't need us — and we'll say so on the call.
Four ways in
Fixed prices, published. Start with the Audit or the Reset.
Engineering Reset
Two weeks. One codebase. A team that can ship.
We review one codebase and the way work flows through it, install a PR review and merge process, get CI green, wire in AI first-pass code review with a human on approval, and leave a phased test-coverage roadmap and a 30-day plan.
R25,000
Fixed. 50% on signing, 50% on delivery. Not a VAT vendor.
- Discovery report — one page for the owner, full findings for the devs
- PR review & merge process, template, ownership map
- CI pipeline running green on every PR
- Phased test-coverage roadmap with hour estimates
- AI first-pass review wired into CI, prompt in a file your team can tune
- 30-day plan, README, hand-over walkthrough
Day-2 checkpoint: if your codebase is bigger than standard, you hear it then — with options.
Delivery Health Audit
Where does work actually get stuck?
A one-week, read-only review of how work moves from ticket to production. We read your Jira and Bitbucket history and show where work stalls, how often it comes back, how predictable delivery is, and whether changes are reviewed and traceable. Every number comes from data your team already produces — no timesheets, no surveys.
R12,500
Fixed, one team (up to two Jira projects and two repos). Extra team R5,000. Not a VAT vendor.
- One-page read-out for leadership
- Full findings for the team lead, with the calculation behind every number
- Five to eight changes ranked by effort and impact
- Raw data and the script that produced it, so you can re-run it
- 30-minute walkthrough
Team-level only — never individual rankings. Optional monthly read-out R3,500/month. Audit + Reset together: R32,500.
Fractional Lead — Core
PopularThe senior in the room, six hours a week.
Every PR reviewed within a working day, a weekly lead sync, async answers within four working hours, and a one-page owner report every Monday.
R18,000 / month
~6 hrs/week · 3-month minimum · billed in advance. Not a VAT vendor.
- PR review — AI first pass, human judgement
- Weekly 45-min lead sync
- Architecture decisions, written down
- Monday one-page owner report
- Hand-over to your permanent hire, included
Fractional Lead — Plus
Core, plus hiring and planning.
Everything in Core, plus sprint facilitation, CV screening and technical interviews for your hires, incident advice during working hours, and two-hour async turnaround.
R30,000 / month
~10 hrs/week · 3-month minimum · billed in advance. Not a VAT vendor.
- Everything in Core
- Sprint / planning facilitation
- CV screening + technical interviews
- Incident advice, working hours
- 2-hour async turnaround
Reset + retainer signed together: Reset is R22,500.
How the two weeks run
Days 1–2
Discovery
Read-only. Nothing in your repo changes. Ends with a checkpoint: if scope is bigger than standard, you hear it now.
Days 3–4
Process
A review and merge process your team can follow, delivered as a pull request.
Days 5–6
CI green
A pipeline running and green on every PR, delivered as a pull request.
Days 7–8
Roadmap + AI review
A phased test-coverage roadmap and AI first-pass review wired into CI, as a pull request.
Days 9–10
Hand-over
The 30-day plan, a README, and a walkthrough call with your team.
What the Audit measures
Per team and per workflow stage, from your Jira and Bitbucket history.
Flow
Where tickets wait between stages, and for how long.
Predictability
How closely what ships matches what was planned.
Rework
How often work comes back after it was called done.
Review & traceability
Whether changes are reviewed and traceable to a ticket.
Delivery
How often, and how quickly, changes reach production.
Done it, not just read about it.
- Technical lead on a production insurance platform (Laravel)
- Designed and delivered a six-phase, 272-hour test-coverage programme inside estimate, CI live from Phase 1
- Wrote and rolled out a team PR review and merge process
- Automated first-pass code review with a human holding approval
- Runs four production Laravel/React products of our own
What we won't do (so you know what you're buying)
- Feature development — we review code, your team writes it
- On-call, weekends, or evenings after 21:00
- Production credentials or deploying to production
- Project management, line management, HR
- Refactoring or reformatting sweeps
- Security penetration testing
Common questions
Send a repo link or describe the platform.
We'll tell you honestly whether the Reset would pay for itself.