01
Say the hard thing early
If a deadline is fiction or a feature is a mistake, you hear it in week one — not in the retrospective. Bad news does not improve with age, and we would rather lose an argument than a launch.
About Basalt
A small studio with an unusually stubborn standard
We started Basalt in 2014 after a decade of watching good ideas die in bad delivery. Twelve years and 120 products later, the thesis has not changed: put senior people on the problem, keep the team small, and never ship something you would not want to maintain yourself.
Our story
Built by people who got tired of rescuing projects
Basalt began with three engineers, one rented desk in Boston, and a single contract to rebuild a logistics platform that two larger firms had already abandoned. It shipped six weeks early. The client introduced us to another, and that has been our entire sales strategy ever since.
We have deliberately stayed small. Forty-one people, four offices, and a hiring bar we have never lowered to win a deal. When we do not have the right team free, we say so and point you somewhere else — which costs us revenue and buys us the kind of trust you cannot advertise.
Today we work with Series-B startups scaling past their first architecture and with enterprises untangling systems older than some of their staff. The work differs. The standard does not.
What we believe
Four principles we actually enforce
Every one of these has cost us money at least once. That is roughly how we know they are real.
02
Ship small, ship often
Nothing sits unmerged for a month. Continuous deployment from the first sprint means risk surfaces while it is still cheap, and you always have something real to react to.
03
Leave it better than we found it
Every engagement ends with documentation, tests and a working handover. Our measure of success is your team not needing to call us — even though most of them still do.
04
Boring technology, on purpose
We reach for the proven tool unless the problem genuinely demands otherwise. Novelty is a cost centre, and someone has to run this system at 3am two years from now.
Milestones
Twelve years, four offices
- 14
Founded in Boston
Three engineers, one contract, and a rescue project nobody else wanted.
- 17
First enterprise platform
A core banking migration for Halcyon that still runs today, untouched.
- 20
Remote-first, permanently
We closed two offices, kept every salary, and grew 60% the following year.
- 23
SOC 2 Type II
Certified across all engagements, with annual independent audits since.
- 26
Basalt AI Studio
A dedicated applied-AI practice, now a third of everything we ship.
The team
The people you will actually work with
No bench, no bait-and-switch. The leads below are on projects right now.
Adrian Vale
Founder & Principal Engineer
Nadia Karim
Head of Engineering
Tomás Ferreira
Director of Design
Elena Marchetti
Head of AI
Julian Ross
Platform Lead
Sofia Lindqvist
Security Lead
Kwame Boateng
Delivery Director
Hana Sato
Principal Product DesignerWe are hiring senior engineers
Four open roles across platform, AI and security. Remote-first, no take-home longer than two hours, and a salary band published in the first email.