# SteerScale

> SteerScale is a senior software engineering consultancy for difficult production systems: backend and distributed systems, cloud and reliability, AI systems engineering, architecture and technical leadership.

Each page below has a Markdown alternate at the same path with a `.md` suffix.

## Company

- [Senior Software Engineering for Production Systems | SteerScale](https://steerscale.com/index.md): SteerScale is a senior software engineering consultancy for difficult production systems: backend and distributed systems, cloud and reliability, AI systems engineering, architecture and technical leadership.
- [Barnabás Szőke & SteerScale | Senior Software Engineering](https://steerscale.com/about.md): SteerScale is a senior-engineer-led consultancy founded by Barnabás Szőke: 15+ years of production backend, distributed and cloud-native systems, now applied to AI systems.
- [Discuss your system | Technical fit call | SteerScale](https://steerscale.com/contact.md): Tell us what the system does and what you're trying to solve. If it looks like a useful fit, the next step is a 20–30 minute technical conversation.

## Services

- [Engineering Services | Backend, Cloud, AI Systems, Architecture | SteerScale](https://steerscale.com/services.md): Senior engineering for systems where production behaviour matters: AI systems engineering, distributed systems and backend, cloud, scale and reliability.
- [Backend & Distributed Systems Engineering | SteerScale](https://steerscale.com/services/backend-distributed-systems.md): Distributed systems that behave predictably under real load: Java, Kotlin, Scala, Kafka, APIs, event-driven architecture and high-throughput services.
- [Cloud, Platform & Reliability Engineering | SteerScale](https://steerscale.com/services/cloud-platform-reliability.md): Production infrastructure built for measurable reliability: AWS, Azure, Kubernetes, performance, observability, capacity, latency and resilience.
- [AI Systems Engineering | LLM & Agent Systems | SteerScale](https://steerscale.com/services/ai-systems-engineering.md): Build and operate LLM and agent systems as production software — with evaluation, observability, reliability and economics designed in.
- [Architecture & Technical Leadership | SteerScale](https://steerscale.com/services/architecture-technical-leadership.md): Architecture reviews, decision records, delivery leadership and hands-on mentoring for engineering teams shipping difficult production systems.

## Productized engagement

- [AI Systems Audit | Cost, Reliability & Evaluation | SteerScale](https://steerscale.com/services/ai-systems-audit.md): A fixed-scope technical audit of one production LLM or agent workflow covering model spend, retries, latency, observability, evaluation and release safety.

## Blog

- [Blog | AI Systems, Distributed Systems & Reliability | SteerScale](https://steerscale.com/blog.md): Notes on AI in production, distributed systems and reliability: retry amplification, cost per successful workflow, model replacement evaluation.
- [The hidden cost of retries in agentic AI systems | SteerScale Blog](https://steerscale.com/blog/the-hidden-cost-of-retries-in-agentic-ai-systems.md): How provider, application, tool and workflow retries combine to increase both latency and cost in agentic AI systems, and how to budget them.