404inc is built on one rule: the people who pitch the work do the work. Senior engineers across platform architecture, distributed systems, ML infrastructure, edge compute, and AI-native tooling — embedded on every engagement, never matrixed across three clients at once. When you ship, the engineers who built it are still on the rotation.
We've worked at large consultancies where the people in the pitch deck never touched the codebase. We built 404inc as the alternative.
Every engagement is led by a senior engineer from day one. No handoffs to juniors, no offshore teams, no account managers in between. The discipline that compounds across our combined experience actually shows up on your repo — because the same people who scoped the work are writing the code.
Jordan founded 404inc in 2002 with one conviction: the platform should outlive the framework. Twenty-two years and forty-plus engagements later, that conviction is still the only thing he sells. He's the first commit on every engagement, the last review before handover, and the person on the other end of the runbook.
My love affair with computers began at the age of 9, the day my dad brought home my very first computer — a glorious beige box that sparked a lifelong passion. Since then, I've ridden every wave of computer evolution: from the wild west of BBS systems and dial-up tones, to the sweet sound of "You've got mail," and all the way to the smart, sleek tech we rely on today.
I've always had a habit of taking things apart (and sometimes even putting them back together), which naturally evolved into building software. These days, I channel that curiosity into creating solutions that make people's lives easier — one line of code at a time.
Still waiting on my honorary PhD in "fixing the Wi-Fi."
Each row a discipline shipped to production — long enough that the lessons compounded.
Pravin joined 404inc in 2025 and runs the ML-infrastructure work across engagements. Twelve years of taking systems apart taught him to read codebases by their seams — when he started writing software in 2020, the same instinct showed up. He's the engineer who'll wire up a working RAG pipeline by Friday and have you arguing about eval methodology by Monday.
My fascination with technology began in childhood, not in front of a screen, but with a screwdriver in hand. I was the kid who loved opening up electronic devices just to see how they worked — and then putting them back together (sometimes successfully). I've always believed that if you really want to understand something, take it apart and explore it from the inside.
That mindset naturally led me to coding. I started programming in 2020, and it quickly became more than a skill — it became a passion. I'm drawn to challenges that others label "impossible" or "not feasible," because I firmly believe that if something can be done, I can figure out how to do it. For me, software is a playground where imagination meets logic, and the only real limit is how far you're willing to go to make something work.
I build because I'm curious. I solve problems because I care. And I keep pushing boundaries because that's just how my mind works.
Twelve years of compounding craft — first hardware, then software, now production-grade ML infrastructure.
Maya spent five years at Stripe building the payment routing infrastructure that moves money for millions of businesses, and two more at Cloudflare working on the edge network that serves a meaningful fraction of internet traffic. She joined 404inc to work on problems that are hard in the same way — distributed, high-stakes, and unforgiving of lazy thinking.
I got into distributed systems because I was allergic to the feeling of not knowing why something failed. A database goes down, an API returns a 500, a payment drops — and in most systems, the answer to "why" is a guess. I've spent my career building systems where the answer is always there, logged, traced, and explainable. That's not idealism. It's the only way to sleep at night when you're responsible for other people's money.
At 404inc I work on the problems that live at the seams: the places where two services meet, where a contract is implicit, where a failure in one layer cascades into a mystery three layers up. Those seams are where platforms age badly — and they're where I spend most of my time.
Fourteen years of distributed systems, payment infrastructure, and edge networking.
Rafael spent a decade at Shopify scaling the platform that powers a significant share of global e-commerce, and then two years at HashiCorp working on the tools that teams use to declare and manage infrastructure. He's the engineer you bring in when the gap between what your infrastructure does and what you think it does is costing you real money.
Most infrastructure problems I've seen are actually documentation problems — the infrastructure exists, it runs, and nobody who works there could tell you why it's shaped the way it is. The decisions that made sense in 2019 are invisible now, and so every change carries the weight of unknown assumptions.
I fix that by treating infrastructure as the most important codebase in the building. IaC, runbooks, decision records — the unsexy work that determines whether a platform is a foundation or a liability. The goal is infrastructure where every configuration line can be justified by someone on the team on a Thursday afternoon.
Sixteen years of platform engineering, infrastructure-as-code, and large-scale operations.
Sienna built and maintained the design system at Linear that shipped to hundreds of thousands of developers, and before that spent five years at Vercel on the frontend tooling that developers interact with every time they deploy. She's the engineer who turns a design system from a Figma file into something that actually prevents bikeshedding at 11pm.
A design system is the most leveraged thing a frontend team can build — and also the easiest thing to do wrong. Most design systems I've inherited are a component library that stopped getting maintained when the person who built it left. A real design system is a contract, not a library. It encodes decisions. It makes doing the right thing easier than doing the wrong thing.
I care about interfaces that are fast, accessible, and built to be inherited by engineers who weren't there when the decisions were made. The goal is code that reads like it has opinions, because it does — and they've been written down.
Eleven years of frontend engineering, design systems, and accessible UI at production scale.
Dmitri spent years at Snowflake helping enterprise teams understand why their data warehouse was returning numbers that didn't match the spreadsheets, and at dbt Labs building the transformation layer that now underpins a large slice of the modern data stack. He's the person you bring in when your analytics platform answers every question except the ones that matter.
The most common data problem isn't a technical problem. It's a trust problem — nobody believes the dashboard because it's been wrong enough times. And the technical problems underneath it are almost always the same: undefined grain, implicit joins, business logic duplicated across five different models, no tests.
I've seen companies invest in expensive data tooling and never get value from it because the foundations weren't right. My job is to fix the foundations — and to make the pipeline boring enough that the insights become interesting again.
Fifteen years of data engineering, analytics infrastructure, and warehousing at enterprise scale.
Amara spent eight years at Auth0 and Okta building the identity infrastructure that secures applications for tens of millions of users. She joined 404inc because she was tired of watching teams bolt on security at the end of a build cycle and pay for it in production incidents. She makes auth a first-class architectural concern from the first sprint.
Security gets treated like a compliance checkbox in most engineering teams. You ship the feature, you pass the audit, you move on. And then six months later you're in an incident post-mortem explaining why a JWT that was supposed to expire in one hour was still being accepted after forty-eight.
I approach identity as a domain problem, not a library selection. The library you pick matters much less than having a coherent model for how identity flows through your system — who can see what, under what conditions, and why. Get that model right in week one and the library almost doesn't matter. Get it wrong and no library saves you.
Thirteen years of auth systems, identity protocols, and application security at scale.
Leon spent five years at Discord working on the realtime infrastructure that handles hundreds of millions of concurrent connections, and then helped Fly.io build the distributed scheduler that runs user applications across their global edge network. He's the engineer you bring in when the number of concurrent users in your SLA exceeds the number your architecture was designed for.
Elixir and OTP changed the way I think about concurrency. Not because of the syntax — because of the model. Processes that crash and restart cleanly, supervision trees that tell you exactly what died and why, message passing that makes shared state explicit. That model is why Discord can drop a connection for one user without affecting the three hundred million users next to them.
I work on the realtime layer at 404inc because that's where most platforms hit a wall they didn't see coming. HTTP works until you need 50,000 concurrent connections. Then it doesn't. And adding WebSockets to a platform that wasn't designed for them is a different problem than building with them from the start.
Twelve years of realtime systems, Elixir / OTP, and edge deployment.
The rules that make a senior-only practice actually feel different. Not a pitch — the day-to-day operating model.
The conversation starts with one email. Send the shape of the problem and we'll respond inside a business day with whether we can help — and if we can't, who can.