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Software engineering & architecture consultancy

Technology that earns its keep.

We help businesses and government organisations turn ambitious ideas into systems that hold up — under real load, real money and real scrutiny. Twenty-five years of doing it, mostly in places where getting it wrong was expensive.

Deep domain experience in Financial Services, Digital Assets, Proptech and eCommerce.

Victorian-owned small business · Melbourne, Victoria

  • 25+Years designing and shipping production systems
  • 3Continents delivered across — AU, UK, UAE
  • 18Largest engineering team led directly
  • 30+Legacy systems decommissioned in one consolidation

What we do

Nine ways we tend to be useful

Some clients need a decision made well once. Others need a system built, a fire put out, or a team levelled up. Most engagements start as one of these and grow into another.

Where we go deep

A consultancy that claims every sector knows none of them

We can work in most domains. But there are four where we have spent long enough to know the failure modes, the regulators' expectations and the shortcuts that come back to bite — and a fifth we are bringing that experience to.

Financial Services

Trading, order and portfolio management, market data, risk, reconciliation and regulatory reporting for global asset managers and brokers.

Digital Assets

Regulated exchanges, custody and wallet infrastructure, blockchain integration, and converged crypto/fiat transaction processing.

Proptech

Data ingestion and enrichment pipelines, CRM integration, propensity modelling and analytics platforms.

eCommerce & Digital

Payment gateways, high-traffic storefronts, checkout and funding flows, and the platform work that keeps conversion healthy.

Government & public sector

Secure integration between agency systems and the platforms around them, modernisation of legacy estates onto well-governed cloud, and AI enablement with the controls public data demands. The discipline regulated finance requires, applied to services people rely on.

  • Secure integration
  • Cloud modernisation
  • AI enablement
How we work with your data

How we operate

Three things we will not trade away

Integrity

Straight answers, including the unwelcome ones. If a project is the wrong idea, or you need less of us than you thought, we will tell you.

Collaboration

We work inside your team, not adjacent to it. Your engineers should finish the engagement more capable than they started it.

Excellence

Pragmatic, not precious. We build the simplest thing that survives contact with real load, real money and real auditors.

Engagement models

Start small. Scale it up if it is working.

We would rather earn a longer engagement than lock you into one. Most relationships begin with a short, fixed-scope piece of work so you can judge us on output instead of on a pitch.

1–2 weeks · fixed price

Technical review

A fixed-price, fixed-scope assessment of your architecture, cloud spend, delivery process or a specific problem area. Price, scope and deliverables are agreed in writing before work starts. You receive a written findings report, a prioritised list of recommendations, and a walkthrough with your team.

Best when you need an independent assessment with a defined deliverable.

1–6 months

Embedded engineering

Hands-on design and implementation alongside your team. We take real tickets, write real code, and hand over documented systems your engineers own afterwards.

Best when you have a build to get done and need senior capacity.

Ongoing

Fractional architect / CTO

A recurring commitment — typically 1–3 days a week — covering architecture decisions, technical governance, hiring, vendor selection and roadmap.

Best when you need senior technical leadership but not a full-time hire.

Who you will work with

You get the principal, not a graduate with a template

Let Them Eat Code is deliberately small. The person who scopes your work is the person who does it — Matt Wood, a solution architect with 25+ years designing and delivering large-scale distributed systems.

That background is mostly in environments with low tolerance for failure: real-time trading and portfolio management, regulated digital-asset exchanges and custody, multi-lateral trading facilities, payment processing and high-traffic consumer platforms. Systems where reliability, security, low latency and fault tolerance were requirements rather than aspirations.

Small by design, and set up so that is not a risk to you:

  • Fixed scope, written down. Every engagement has agreed deliverables and a finish line, so the work does not depend on open-ended availability.
  • Documented as we go. Decisions, designs and runbooks live in your repositories and wiki from day one, not in one person’s head.
  • Handover built in. Your team pairs on the work and owns it at the end. Nothing we build needs us to keep running.
More about the background

next step

Got something that needs an experienced pair of eyes?

An initial discussion is free, thirty minutes, and has no deck. Tell us what you are wrestling with and we will tell you honestly whether we can help — and if we cannot, who might.