Senior engineering studio
Principal-led engineering

We build your software,
and we stay.

We build, modernize and operate software businesses depend on: from the first conversation to production, and for as long as it runs.

Build / Maintain / Grow together

01 / Perspective

Who are you?

You’ve heard this one. A team builds fast, sends the invoice, and goes quiet. Six months later there’s a system nobody understands and nobody will touch.

It’s a fair worry. We work differently: a small, senior engineering team stays close to the product after it ships, because software nobody understands or maintains stops being worth much.

02 / Capabilities

What can you do?

  1. Build

    You need software that doesn’t exist yet. Portals, internal tools, booking systems, dashboards, operations platforms. We take it from the first conversation to something your team uses every day.

  2. Integrate

    Your systems don’t talk to each other. Payments, third-party services, APIs between tools that were never meant to meet. We make them work together, and keep them working.

  3. Modernize

    You have a system that works but is getting harder to change. We improve it without stopping the business running on it. Most studios won’t touch old code. We will: our principals have taken more than two hundred Adobe Flash pages to modern JavaScript without changing what they did.

  4. Scale

    It works, but not at the size you’re growing into. We find the bottlenecks, improve performance and strengthen the architecture so the system can handle what comes next.

  5. Operate

    After launch, someone has to keep the system healthy. We monitor it, fix what breaks, improve what slows down and keep it evolving as your business changes.

03 / Selected Experience

Is there any proof?

Work our principals led in the roles and contracts they held before Mithetra. Some of it we can name. Some of it we can’t, and we’d rather say so than blur a logo.

  1. Mobility platformNDA

    Illustrative reconstruction

    An illustrative dispatch console for a ride-hailing platform: a night map of a city with drivers as points and two zones outlined where supply runs short, a queue of unassigned requests, and a chart of requests against available drivers through an evening peak.An illustrative rider app screen: the driver three minutes away on a dark map, and the trip’s details below.

    A large-scale ride-hailing platform: the apps riders sign in to, the promotions that bring them back and the consoles operators run the day from. Our principals led its engineering.

  2. Smart-city platformNDA

    Illustrative reconstruction

    An illustrative street-works register for a city, drawn as an issued sheet: a corridor plan with two works clashing on one stretch of road, the programme beneath it, and a detail of the clash keyed off the plan.

    A city platform a decade old, given a modern layer so new products could ship without switching the old one off, and every payment provider behind one door. Our principals built that layer.

  3. Pizza 4P’s

    Product capture

    The Pizza 4P’s reservations page: a table search over a photograph of a restaurant interior, and the cities the group operates in.

    Ordering, delivery, reservations and kitchen screens for a restaurant group, with the payment and delivery partners underneath. Our principals worked across all of it, front end to back.

  4. Dekanta

    Prototype capture

    Two pages of the Dekanta storefront prototype on the shop’s own paper: the Japanese whisky category, a bottle among maple leaves across its banner, and a product page for a single cask standing in front of it; the shop’s name brushed across the dark foot of the plate.

    A Japanese whisky retailer’s storefront, rebuilt as a fast new front end over the content system they already ran, so nothing had to migrate to go live. The prototype shipped; the retailer changed course before launch.

  5. Commenty

    Product capture

    The Commenty workspace on the product’s violet: a grid of design files with their comment counts, and a comment thread open over it.

    A feedback workspace for design teams: comments pinned to the work, and threads that stay attached to the version they were made on. Our principals built a core part of the product and moved it off its legacy code.

04 / How we work

How do you work?

  1. Discovery

    Understand the business, the users, the constraints and what success needs to look like.

  2. Architecture

    Define the technical foundation, system boundaries and the decisions that are expensive to change later.

  3. Design

    Turn workflows and requirements into interfaces people can actually use.

  4. Build

    Build in working increments, review continuously and keep the code maintainable from the start.

  5. Deploy

    Move into production carefully, with the environments, access and deployment process under control.

  6. Support

    Stay after launch to monitor, maintain and improve the system as real usage reveals what comes next.

The commitments

  1. You talk to the engineer who builds it. Not an account manager.

  2. You own your code and your cloud accounts from day one, so you’re never locked in.

  3. A written update every week, whether or not there’s good news.

  4. At handover you get the code, the documentation, the deployment and the keys.

  5. We don’t disappear after launch.

05 / Principals

Our principals have been building production software since 2018: big enterprise systems, small startup products, and a fair bit in between.

  1. Most of it on systems that were already running and couldn’t stop. We know how a payment flow fails when it has to clear across ten different providers, what a dispatch platform does to somebody’s evening when a deploy goes wrong, and what a restaurant needs from the kitchen screen through to the reservation. If that’s your world, you won’t be explaining it to us twice.

  2. We’ve run engineering teams and set the hiring bar for them, which mostly means we know what good work looks like and what it costs. It’s why we’d rather give you a number you don’t like than one you do.

  3. And when a project needs a specialist in infrastructure, mobile or design, we bring in someone senior we’ve worked with before. We’ve run teams that way for years, and it’s how the work normally goes. You’ll still be talking to us. The principals remain accountable for the work.

06 / Initiate

Tell us about your project.

Send us a note about what you’re building. We’ll reply with questions, not a quote.

hello@mithetra.com

Not sure what to write?

  • What you’re building
  • What already exists
  • Where you’re stuck