§00/About
A small senior team, by design.
Stribog is an engineering-sovereignty practice: infrastructure, Kubernetes on Talos, DevOps, self-hosted and local-first tooling, audit-grade rigor, and the long-term optionality that keeps a serious organization in control of its own systems. We are deliberately small — and that is the point.
§01/Who We Are
An engineering-sovereignty practice — not a staffing agency.
We help engineering teams own the systems they depend on: design them, operate them, and keep the freedom to change their minds later. That is one discipline, applied across the full stack.
Stribog exists for a specific kind of decision — the infrastructure decision that constrains an organization's options for the next decade. We work where that decision lives: production Kubernetes on Talos Linux, GitOps-driven platform engineering, self-hosted and local-first tooling that keeps data inside a perimeter you control, sovereign AI inference, and the audit-grade evidence that makes self-hosting defensible in a regulated environment.
Our central conviction is in our own structure: a small senior team is a deliberate strategy and a client advantage. The people who scope your engagement are the people who build it. There is no junior bench to subsidize, no offshore handoff, no account manager translating between you and the engineers. You talk to the people doing the work, and they have run systems like yours in production before.
We argue the thesis behind the practice in depth on the thesis page; here we tell you who actually shows up, how we work, and why the size of the team is a feature, not a limitation.
§02/Small By Design
Senior-only is a strategy, not a constraint.
Most consultancies grow by adding leverage: a pyramid of junior engineers under a thin layer of senior names you met during the sales cycle. We refuse the pyramid. We take fewer engagements and do each one deeply, with the people whose names are on the proposal.
The people who scope it are the people who build it.
There is no handoff from the senior team that won the work to a delivery team you have never met. The engineers in the briefing are the engineers in your cluster. Continuity of context is not a coordination problem we manage — it is structural, because the team is small enough that nothing falls between the seams.
Direct access to expertise, not a ticket queue.
No account manager sits between you and the engineering. When you need a decision, you reach the person who can make it — and they answer with the actual trade-off, not a status update. Fewer people means fewer translation layers, and translation layers are where accountability goes to die.
We take fewer engagements, on purpose.
Capacity is finite and we treat it that way. We would rather decline work than dilute it across too many fronts. Each engagement gets senior attention from start to handoff, because we are not optimizing for headcount utilization — we are optimizing for the depth that makes the system durable.
You are never handed to a B-team.
The classic consulting failure mode — sold by the A-team, delivered by whoever was on the bench — cannot happen here, because there is no bench. The seniority you evaluate during scoping is the seniority that operates in production, debugs the 2 a.m. incident, and trains your team to take over.
Small is not a stage we are trying to grow out of. It is the operating model. It is how we keep accountability undiluted, decisions fast, and every engagement staffed by people who have done this before.
§03/How We Operate
The five pillars, as operating values.
The pillars are not a values poster. They are the questions we ask on every engagement and the standards we are held to. Each one names a concrete way we work — and a concrete failure we refuse to ship.
OWN-THE-PERIMETER
We map every layer of your stack to an owner — not a vendor.
Owning the perimeter means your team can recover the system independently: documented runbooks they have rehearsed, backups tested for restore latency, a network perimeter defined in code and reviewed in pull requests. Every external dependency becomes a documented risk acceptance, not an invisible assumption nobody chose on purpose.
OSS-AS-DISCIPLINE
We build on tools you can read, and we say so when OSS is the wrong call.
Open source is a discipline of inspection, contribution, and independence — not a license type to tick on an audit form. We prefer Talos, Argo CD, Cilium, and Prometheus because the behavior is auditable from source. KubeVigil, our flagship project, is the proof: the same rigor we sell, shipped in the open.
EVIDENCE-BY-DEFAULT
We make the evidence a byproduct of operations, not a deadline scramble.
Policy-as-code enforces constraints at admission time and logs every decision. RBAC is reviewed on every pull request. Audit trails carry cryptographic integrity. An auditor can open the repository and understand the system without scheduling a Q&A — because the controls were designed in, not bolted on under deadline.
EXIT-RAMPS-DESIGNED-IN
We design the exit before we design the build.
At every layer we ask what the migration cost is if a vendor doubles its price, deprecates an API, or is acquired. Standard formats, portable manifests, observability in open protocols — so no decision quietly closes off a future one. Anti-lock-in is an architecture choice, applied at the start, not a retrofit when you want to leave.
BUILT-FOR-DECADES
We build systems proportioned to their actual lifecycle.
Decade-scale thinking means resisting over-engineering when a simpler design is durable, and investing in complexity only when the lifecycle cost justifies it. We write for the team that inherits the system in 2030, not just the team that built it in 2025 — readable, documented, self-explanatory, and theirs to operate.
§04/Proof, Not Claims
Depth you can verify, not a list of logos.
Credibility in this field is demonstrated, not asserted. We point to two kinds of evidence: open-source work you can read in full, and an anonymized track record across regulated industries where the patterns — never the clients — are public.
KubeVigil — the practice, shipped in the open.
KubeVigil is our flagship open-source project: an Apache-2.0 Kubernetes security-posture tool that scans live clusters or manifests, maps each finding to remediation, and integrates with CI pipelines and AI assistants. It is not a marketing artifact. It is the audit-grade discipline we sell, written as code anyone can inspect, run, and contribute to — the most honest proof of depth we can offer.
Explore the open-source workAn anonymized track record in serious environments.
We have built and handed off sovereign infrastructure across regulated industries. The case studies are anonymized composites — real patterns, no real names — because confidentiality is non-negotiable. What they share: a board-level risk, a deliberate exit from concentration, and a team that operates the result without us.
- A regulated fintechA payments platform exiting single-hyperscaler concentration that surfaced in diligence — owned Kubernetes on the payment path, documented exit ramps at every layer.
- A healthcare SaaSA regulated platform deploying AI inference inside its own perimeter — patient context never leaving the cluster, verified by network policy and egress audit.
- A logistics platformA Series-B company standing up self-operated Kubernetes on Talos — cost predictability and audit-readiness that managed services could not produce.
§05/What We Are Not
The clearest way to describe a practice is by what it refuses to be.
Technical buyers have been burned by consultancies that would not define their limits. Here is ours, plainly. If you are looking for any of these, we are not the right partner — and we would rather tell you now.
Not a body shop.
We do not sell seats by the month or staff a project by headcount. You hire a small senior team for a scoped outcome, not a roster of contractors billing hours against a backlog.
Not a reseller.
We take no kickbacks, referral fees, or partner margins. We do not recommend a managed service because we profit from it. The advice you get is the advice we would give if our revenue did not depend on the answer.
Not a lock-in vendor.
We do not build systems that require our continued involvement to operate. If the infrastructure we deliver cannot be maintained by a competent team without us, we have failed at the job.
Not a deck-and-pilot consultancy.
Our deliverables are working systems and the documents that make them operable — not a slide deck, not a proof-of-concept that quietly dies after the invoice. If you need a board deck, we will help you build one from the assessment. The work product is always the real thing.
§06/The Long Game
We make ourselves replaceable on purpose.
Most consultancies design for renewal. The incentives push toward systems only the vendor fully understands, integrations nobody documented, and a quiet dependency that turns into an annuity. We design against that gravity deliberately, because the long game and our clients' interests are the same game.
Success, for us, is your team's independence — not our retainer. Every engagement is built to end with a handoff: runbooks written by the people who built the system, ADRs that capture every decision, and engineers on your side who operated the stack in parallel before we stepped back. We design our own exit ramps, the same way we design yours.
Engineering sovereignty is not a destination you arrive at and a vendor you keep. It is a practice your own team carries forward. The measure of our work is whether they would hire us again because they want to — not because they have to.
Senior-only delivery, ownership transfer by default, exit ramps designed in. The business model depends on your independence — not on a dependency we engineered.
§00/The Five Pillars
Sovereignty
OWN-THE-PERIMETER
Engineering teams owning the full stack they depend on — no invisible landlords, no rented foundations.
Open source as method
OSS-AS-DISCIPLINE
Open source is a discipline of review, contribution, and independence — not a license type to tick on an audit form.
Audit-grade rigor
EVIDENCE-BY-DEFAULT
Security and compliance aren't retrofit — they are the bar that makes self-hosting safe in regulated, serious environments.
Optionality
EXIT-RAMPS-DESIGNED-IN
Anti-lock-in by architecture: every layer has a documented exit ramp so no vendor can hold you hostage.
The long game
BUILT-FOR-DECADES
Systems proportioned to outlast the tools, vendors, and leadership changes that will come in the decade after delivery.
Executive Briefing
Thirty minutes to clarify your infrastructure risk
Walk us through your vendor footprint and regulatory constraints. We will tell you honestly where sovereignty creates leverage — and where it does not. No pitch deck. No obligation.