Guided software expeditions

Your technical
guide up the mountain.

NerdySherpas partners with SaaS companies to architect, build, and scale the systems behind the product. Small team, senior engineers, rope bridges included.

Trusted by founders from

Backups.so
ProxyHook
Digital Media Solutions
Intentwave
Persistent.id
Wolf Dev
Intellisync AI
T3Sixty
What we do

Six disciplines.
One rope team.

We embed with your team like a senior squad that already knows the codebase. One sprint or eighteen months — we scope to the problem, not the calendar.

01

Custom software

Greenfield builds, rebuilds, and the messy middle. JavaScript, Node.js, PHP — the stack we ship with, every day.

02

Database architecture

Schema design, query tuning, warehouse pipelines. Postgres, MySQL, DynamoDB, Redshift, BigQuery — picked for the workload.

03

API design & integration

REST APIs, webhooks, and Kafka/Kinesis event streams. Versioning that doesn't break customers. Third-party integrations that actually hold.

04

Full-stack web

React and Next.js, backed by Node.js or PHP — whatever the codebase already speaks. Design systems too.

05

Cloud & DevOps

AWS (Lambda, API Gateway, S3, RDS) and GCP (BigQuery, Cloud Functions). Cloudflare Workers on the edge, Docker where it belongs, boring pipelines everywhere else.

06

Performance audits

Profilers, flame graphs, cold-path hunts. If your p95 is embarrassing, we'll find the why in a week.

How we work

The route, in four milestones.

We don't do discovery phases that turn into PowerPoints. We do short, scoped engagements with working software at every checkpoint.

Basecamp — a 30-minute call

You tell us what's broken, what's planned, what keeps you up. We tell you honestly whether we're the right fit. No deck, no discovery fee.

Route — a two-page proposal

Fixed scope, fixed team, fixed timeline. You get a written plan with decisions called out, risks flagged, and a timeline that accounts for the messy parts.

Climb — two-week sprints, working code

You get a PR every Friday. A Loom walkthrough. A Slack channel with your engineers, not an account manager. Course-correct anytime.

Summit — handoff you can actually run

Runbooks, on-call docs, architectural decision records. We train your team and stay on retainer for the first 90 days post-ship.

Selected work

Recent expeditions.

Most of our work sits behind the product — backup infra, ingest pipelines, billing systems. Here's one we can talk about.

backups.so/dashboard
workspace-prodHEALTHY
docs-archiveHEALTHY
team-sharedHEALTHY
personal-scratchIDLE
Case Study · SaaS · 14 weeks

Rebuilt an entire backup platform while it kept serving customers.

Backups.so needed a ground-up rewrite of their ingest pipeline, a multi-region S3 replication layer, and six new export formats — without a visible downtime window. We shipped in 14 weeks, zero incidents.

0.0xFaster ingest p95
0Customer-visible incidents
0New export formats
“They didn't just ship the work — they left our team better. The architecture decisions we made with them are still the right calls a year later.”
MCMarcus Chen · CTO, Backups.so
0+
SaaS companies guided to ship
0
Senior engineers on the rope team
0.0%
Average uptime we ship to
0yr
Median years of experience per engineer
Basecamp

Pack your bags. Let's talk.

Tell us what you're building and what's in the way. We reply within a day — a real engineer, not a form robot.

1
Discovery call. 30 minutes, no deck. You talk, we listen, we ask the awkward questions.
2
Written proposal. Two pages. Scope, timeline, price, risks — all in plain English.
3
Kickoff in days, not weeks. If we're a fit, we're on your Slack by the following Monday.
We'll need a name.
That email doesn't look right.
A sentence or two helps us prep.