About
A small studio of senior engineers who think the industry has gotten silly.
Upcast is six engineers, no managers, no growth team. We started in 2022 after years inside scale-ups watching well-meaning teams reach for microservices, GraphQL, and Kubernetes before they had earned any of it. We build software the way we wish the last team had — deliberately, in writing, with code somebody else can pick up later.
What we believe
Six positions. We argue them in client meetings; you should know going in.
Most teams reach for distributed systems before they have a distributed problem. We start with the simplest topology that fits, and split only when the load tells us to.
If a request-response page handles the workflow, that's the design. Heavy clients earn their place with a measurable interaction need — not because it's the default.
Boring data infrastructure carries you further than any team admits. We pick proven primitives, write them down, and only graduate when there's a real reason to.
Users feel the seams more than the feature count. We'd rather ship five flows that delight than fifteen that almost work.
Optionality is a tax. We write the code our future selves can rip out cleanly when the requirements change — because they will.
100% coverage is a vanity metric. We test the things that, when they break, wake somebody up — and skip the rest with a clear conscience.
The team
Six engineers. One pager rotation.
Brief history
Four years in.
Same shape we started with.
We have not raised, will not, and have a written rule against growing past twelve engineers. The studio is the deliverable.
- 2022
Camille leaves a senior platform role and writes a one-page brief about how she wants to do the work.
- 2022
Théo and Anne join. First three engagements are stack audits, all on referral.
- 2023
Naomi and Rémi bring frontend craft and data infra. We retire the second microservice we ever shipped — for a customer that asked us to.
- 2024
We sign a three-year retainer with a logistics scale-up after rebuilding their dispatch UI in nine weeks.
- 2025
Pierre brings the SRE practice in-house. We start running customer pagers without breaking a sweat.
- 2026
Six engineers, three full-stack engagements, two retainers, one embedded engineer placement. Same shape.
How we operate
The operating manual, abridged.
We write a lot of these down internally. The shorthand version below is the part you'll feel as a customer.
- Working hours
- 09:00–18:00 CET, four days a week. Friday is async-only.
- Communication
- One shared Slack channel per engagement. Decisions land in a written ADR within the day.
- Source control
- Trunk-based, small PRs, no long-lived branches. Reviewed within four working hours.
- Code style
- Whatever the project ships with. We adopt your conventions; we don't re-litigate them.
- Confidentiality
- NDA on inbound. We don't reuse customer code, and we credit prior art when we open-source.
- Sub-contractors
- None. Every line we ship is written by someone on the team page.
Careers
We hire when the work earns it.
We add an engineer about once a year. We never take on bench, and we don't have a recruiting team. If you'd like to be the seventh engineer at Upcast, write to us with something you've built.
- · You've owned a production database. You can talk about a vacuum gone wrong.
- · You've shipped server-rendered web apps and don't think the SPA is the only option.
- · You've held a pager. You've written a postmortem you're proud of.
- · You write English well enough that a customer reads your ADR and nods.
no recruiters, no take-home tests