Survey first
We read the code, trace the data, and map the failure modes before proposing anything. No plan survives contact with a system nobody has actually looked at.
Surface · 0 m · Independent engineering studio · Tampa, FL
The hard problems are
below the surface.
cavenine takes on the systems work most teams route around — distributed systems, security platforms, streaming pipelines, and the infrastructure that has to hold when millions of endpoints are connected at once.
- Survey
- cavenine.com
- Datum
- surface · 0 m
- Floor
- −238 m
- Stations
- 05
Begin descent
Stn 01 · −40 m · The work
Six territories, one discipline
Production systems that keep working when the load is real. Everything below has been built, shipped, and carried on-call.
Distributed systems
Consensus, replication, backpressure. Systems that stay correct across failure domains and keep their promises under partition.
Cloud infrastructure
The platform under the product: infrastructure as code, multi-account AWS, networking, and paved roads that let small teams ship like large ones.
Security platforms
Fleet telemetry, detection pipelines, code signing, and key management for products that defend millions of endpoints.
Streaming & pipelines
High-throughput ingest, ETL that survives bad data, and exactly-once delivery in the places where it actually matters.
Databases
Schema design, query plans, storage engines. Postgres tuned until the latency dashboard goes quiet.
AI developer tools
LLMs wired into real workflows: agent infrastructure, retrieval pipelines, and inference that holds up in production.
Stn 02 · −90 m · Found at depth
What we’ve brought back
Not projections. Systems that ran, and numbers they earned.
- Security platforms we built and operated, with telemetry reporting frommillions of endpoints in the field.
- Connection and streaming infrastructure holding millions of concurrent connections — designed for the worst day, not the demo.
- Two years of unattended production code signing on AWS KMS: thousands of installers signed for under $50 a month, no HSM appliance involved. The write-up is public.
- Senior engineering without hand-offs — the person you talk to is the person who designs and builds the system.
Stn 03 · −140 m · Method
How we go in
Caving and systems engineering reward the same temperament: preparation over bravado.
Anchor twice
Nothing hangs from a single bolt. Redundant paths, failover that has actually been failed over, alarms that mean something — no single component decides how the night goes.
Run the line
Cave divers keep an unbroken guideline to open water. So do our systems: every deploy reversible, every request traceable, always a way back to a known-good state.
Carry less
Fewer moving parts means fewer things that bite in the dark. Boring technology, chosen deliberately and run superbly.
Stn 04 · −190 m · Field notes
Notes from the descent
Occasional write-ups of problems we’ve solved, with enough detail to reproduce the fix.
All field notesStn 05 · −238 m · The floor
You’ve reached the floor.
If your problem lives down here — the distributed, the security-critical, the too-big-to-fail — we should talk.
Start a conversationcontact@cavenine.com · replies come from an engineer