About
A small studio, deliberately
TechKernel started in 2016 after too many projects where the people who sold the work were not the people who did it. We stayed small so that the engineers you meet are the engineers who build your system.
Our story
Why we work this way
Most software problems we are called in for are not really technical. A team knows what to build but cannot ship it, because the deployment process is frightening, or the test suite is untrusted, or nobody is willing to touch the one service that everything depends on.
So we tend to start by making change safe — real environments, honest tests, deploys that are boring — and only then move fast. It feels slower for the first month and is considerably faster by the third.
We also decline work. If your problem is better solved by an off-the-shelf product, or if the timeline cannot be met without cutting something that matters, we will say so before you have signed anything.
What we value
Four commitments
Say the hard thing early
If a deadline is unrealistic or an approach is wrong, you hear it from us the week we notice — not in a retrospective.
Build for the team that inherits it
Code is read far more often than it is written. We optimize for the engineer who picks it up after we're gone.
Working software over status updates
Every cycle ends with something you can actually use. Progress you cannot click on is not progress.
Leave you independent
A successful engagement ends with your team owning the system. We measure ourselves on how well the handover goes.
- Products shipped to production
- 60+
- Years of average engineer experience
- 12
- Median uptime across managed platforms
- 99.98%
- Post-engagement client rating
- 4.9/5
Team
The people you'll actually work with
No account managers between you and the engineers. The team below is the team on your project.
Ada Reyes
Founder & Principal Engineer
Spent a decade on payments infrastructure before starting TechKernel. Still reviews every architecture plan that leaves the studio.
Marcus Oyelaran
Head of Platform
Builds the deployment and observability foundations our projects sit on. Believes most outages are a documentation problem.
Priya Raghavan
Head of Data
Works on pipelines and applied ML. Insists on an evaluation set before anyone writes a model.
Jonas Ek
Principal Product Designer
Designs the interface and the system behind it. Prefers a rough prototype in front of users over a polished one in a deck.
Sofia Duarte
Delivery Lead
Keeps engagements honest about scope and timeline. The person who tells you early when a date is slipping.
Tom Whitaker
Principal Engineer, Modernization
Has migrated more legacy systems than he cares to count. Has never once recommended a full rewrite.
We hire slowly
We do not keep a permanent careers page open. If you are a senior engineer, designer, or delivery lead who likes this way of working, write to techkernel.dev@gmail.com and tell us what you have built. We read everything.
Have a project in mind?
Tell us what you're building and the constraints you're working under. We'll come back within one business day with an honest read on whether we're the right fit.