Stop Building Roadblocks. Start Paving Golden Paths.
Our AI-Enabled Platform Engineering services help you build a world-class Internal Developer Platform (IDP) that eliminates friction, accelerates delivery, and unleashes developer productivity.
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Is Your Engineering Velocity Grinding to a Halt?
If your teams are battling tool sprawl, inconsistent environments, and complex deployment pipelines, you're not alone. These are symptoms of cognitive overload, and they directly kill productivity and innovation.
Slow Developer Onboarding
New hires spend weeks, not days, navigating complex setups and tribal knowledge just to get their first "hello world" to production.
Inconsistent Environments
The dreaded "it works on my machine" problem creates endless cycles of debugging and rework, causing friction between dev, test, and ops.
Security & Compliance Bottlenecks
Security reviews and compliance checks become manual gates that stall releases, forcing a trade-off between speed and safety.
High Cognitive Load
Developers are forced to be experts in Kubernetes, Terraform, CI/CD, and cloud networking just to ship a simple feature, distracting them from their core job.
Toolchain Chaos
A tangled mess of scripts, plugins, and homegrown tools creates a brittle, unmaintainable delivery process that no one fully understands.
Lack of Visibility
Engineering leaders have no clear way to measure or improve the developer experience, making it impossible to identify and fix the real bottlenecks.
Why Partner with CIS for Platform Engineering?
We don't just build platforms; we build engines for developer productivity. By treating your platform as a product and your developers as customers, we create a paved road that makes the right way the easy way.
AI-Accelerated Delivery
We leverage AI-powered code assistants, pipeline optimizers, and infrastructure-as-code generators to build your IDP faster and more efficiently, delivering value in weeks, not years.
Battle-Tested Blueprints
With over 20 years of experience, we don't start from scratch. We bring proven architectures and "golden path" templates for various stacks, ensuring a robust, scalable, and secure foundation.
Fanatical DevEx Focus
Your developers are our primary customers. We conduct deep user research and feedback loops to ensure the platform we build is one they love to use, driving organic adoption.
Security as a Foundation
Our CMMI Level 5 and SOC 2 compliant processes mean security isn't an afterthought. We embed automated security, compliance, and governance directly into your golden paths.
Composable & Open
We build your IDP on open standards like Kubernetes, Backstage, and Terraform. You get a flexible, composable platform, not vendor lock-in. Full IP transfer is our standard.
Empowerment, Not Dependency
Our goal is to make ourselves obsolete. We provide comprehensive documentation, training, and pair-programming to enable your team to own, operate, and evolve the platform.
Data-Driven Improvement
We integrate metrics and observability (like DORA metrics) into the platform from day one, giving you the visibility to continuously measure and improve your engineering performance.
Global Expertise, Local Touch
With 1000+ in-house experts and a 95% retention rate, we provide stable, long-term teams that understand the nuances of enterprise-scale platform engineering for a global audience.
Pragmatic & Phased ROI
We focus on delivering tangible value quickly. We'll help you identify the highest-impact "golden path" to build first, demonstrating clear ROI to build momentum for the program.
Our Comprehensive Platform Engineering Services
We offer a full spectrum of services to design, build, and evolve a world-class Internal Developer Platform tailored to your organization's unique needs.
IDP Strategy & Roadmapping
A great platform starts with a clear vision. We work with your leadership to define the goals, scope, and phased roadmap for your IDP initiative. We assess your current developer workflow, identify the biggest friction points, and create a data-backed business case for building a platform that aligns with your strategic objectives.
Key Outcomes:
- A clear, prioritized roadmap for your IDP with measurable KPIs.
- Executive alignment and a strong business case for investment.
- Deep understanding of your current developer experience bottlenecks.
Golden Path Engineering
This is the core of your IDP. We engineer end-to-end, production-ready "golden paths" for your common application types (e.g., microservice, data pipeline, front-end app). These paved roads abstract away complexity, providing developers with a fast, secure, and compliant way to build, test, and deploy software.
Key Outcomes:
- Drastically reduced time-to-market for new services and features.
- Standardized tech stacks, security practices, and deployment patterns.
- Increased developer velocity and reduced cognitive load.
Developer Portal Implementation (Backstage & alternatives)
We build the "single pane of glass" for your engineering organization. Using tools like Spotify's Backstage, we create a central hub where developers can discover and use golden paths, see service ownership, view documentation, and monitor CI/CD pipelines. This portal becomes the front door to your entire platform.
Key Outcomes:
- A unified interface for all your internal tools and services.
- Improved service discoverability and reduced tribal knowledge.
- A foundation for building a thriving internal engineering community.
Platform Security & Governance (DevSecOps)
We shift security left by embedding it directly into your platform. This includes creating secure-by-default base images, integrating automated vulnerability scanning (SAST/DAST/SCA) into pipelines, and implementing policy-as-code using tools like OPA. We make compliance an automated, low-friction part of the development process.
Key Outcomes:
- Automated security guardrails that prevent vulnerabilities from reaching production.
- Reduced friction between development and security teams.
- Continuous compliance with industry regulations (e.g., SOC 2, ISO 27001).
CI/CD & Toolchain Modernization
We untangle your CI/CD spaghetti. We help you consolidate, modernize, and standardize your build and release pipelines. By creating reusable, templated CI/CD workflows, we ensure that every service benefits from best practices in testing, security scanning, and deployment strategies without manual configuration.
Key Outcomes:
- Faster, more reliable, and more secure build and release cycles.
- Reduced maintenance overhead for your DevOps team.
- Consistent delivery practices across all engineering teams.
Kubernetes & Container Platforms
We build and manage the container orchestration layer that powers your IDP. Whether it's on EKS, GKE, AKS, or a self-hosted cluster, we implement best practices for multi-tenancy, security, networking (service mesh), and cluster lifecycle management, providing a stable and scalable runtime for your applications.
Key Outcomes:
- A production-grade, secure, and scalable Kubernetes foundation.
- Simplified cluster management and operations.
- Efficient resource utilization and application portability.
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) & GitOps
We help you manage your entire platform declaratively using IaC and GitOps principles. By defining infrastructure, applications, and policies in Git, you get a version-controlled, auditable, and easily reproducible system. We use tools like Terraform, Crossplane, and ArgoCD to automate provisioning and reconciliation.
Key Outcomes:
- Reliable and repeatable infrastructure provisioning.
- A single source of truth for your entire system's desired state.
- Enhanced security and disaster recovery capabilities.
Observability & SRE Enablement
A platform is incomplete without robust observability. We integrate logging, metrics, and tracing into your golden paths, providing developers with immediate feedback on their application's performance and health. We help establish SRE best practices like SLOs/SLIs to foster a culture of reliability and data-driven decision making.
Key Outcomes:
- Reduced Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR) for production incidents.
- Empowered developers who can own the reliability of their services.
- Proactive performance monitoring and alerting.
MLOps & Data Platform Engineering
We extend platform engineering principles to your data and machine learning teams. We build specialized golden paths for ML model training, deployment, and monitoring, as well as self-service platforms for data ingestion and processing. This accelerates the path from data experimentation to production ML applications.
Key Outcomes:
- A streamlined, reproducible process for deploying and managing ML models.
- Increased productivity for data scientists and ML engineers.
- A scalable foundation for your organization's AI/ML initiatives.
FinOps & Cloud Cost Optimization
We build cost visibility and governance directly into your platform. By integrating tools like OpenCost and providing developers with clear feedback on the cost of their infrastructure choices, we help you foster a culture of cost accountability. We implement automated policies to prevent budget overruns and optimize cloud spend.
Key Outcomes:
- Clear visibility into cloud spend, broken down by team, service, or feature.
- Reduced cloud waste and optimized resource allocation.
- Empowered engineers who can make cost-conscious architectural decisions.
Platform as a Product Enablement
We help you make the crucial cultural shift to treating your platform as an internal product. This involves establishing a dedicated platform team with a product manager, setting up clear communication channels, creating feedback loops, and marketing the platform internally to drive adoption and demonstrate value to the business.
Key Outcomes:
- A sustainable, long-term model for evolving your platform.
- A platform that continuously adapts to the changing needs of developers.
- Increased business value and recognition for the platform engineering team.
AI-Powered Platform Tooling
We integrate Generative AI to supercharge your developer experience. This includes building custom AI-powered software scaffolding tools, creating chatbots for troubleshooting common platform issues, and developing AI agents that can automatically generate boilerplate IaC or CI/CD pipeline configurations based on simple developer prompts.
Key Outcomes:
- Further reduction in developer cognitive load and manual effort.
- Intelligent, context-aware assistance for developers using the platform.
- A cutting-edge platform that attracts and retains top engineering talent.
Legacy System Abstraction
We help you bring legacy systems into the modern platform world without requiring a full rewrite. We build abstraction layers and anti-corruption layers around your monoliths, exposing them as well-defined APIs that can be consumed by new, cloud-native services. This allows you to innovate faster while incrementally modernizing your core systems.
Key Outcomes:
- Safely integrate legacy systems with your modern microservices architecture.
- Unlock the data and functionality trapped in monolithic applications.
- De-risk and accelerate your modernization journey.
InnerSource Strategy & Tooling
We help you foster a culture of collaboration by implementing InnerSource practices. This involves setting up the tools and processes that allow teams to easily contribute improvements back to the core platform and shared services. By breaking down silos, you accelerate innovation and improve the quality of your internal software ecosystem.
Key Outcomes:
- Higher quality and more resilient shared platform components.
- Increased knowledge sharing and reduced duplication of effort.
- A more engaged and collaborative engineering culture.
Platform Team Augmentation
Need to scale your platform team quickly? We provide vetted, AI-enabled platform engineers, SREs, and DevOps specialists to work as an integrated part of your team. Our experts can help you accelerate your roadmap, tackle complex challenges, and upskill your existing team members through hands-on collaboration.
Key Outcomes:
- Instantly fill critical skill gaps in your platform engineering team.
- Accelerate the delivery of your IDP roadmap.
- Transfer expert knowledge and best practices to your in-house staff.
Our Phased & Pragmatic Approach
We deliver value incrementally, ensuring each phase builds upon the last and delivers measurable improvements to your developer experience.
Discover & Align (Weeks 1-2)
We begin with intensive workshops with your engineering leadership and developer teams. We map your existing value stream, identify the most painful bottlenecks, and define the vision and KPIs for your platform. The outcome is a clear, prioritized roadmap for the first "golden path."
Build the Thinnest Viable Platform (Weeks 3-6)
We don't try to boil the ocean. We focus on building the absolute minimum set of tools and automation needed to support the first golden path. This includes setting up the core IaC, CI/CD templates, and container platform, proving the end-to-end flow quickly.
Onboard Early Adopters & Iterate (Weeks 7-10)
We identify a pilot team to be the first "customer" of the new platform. We work hand-in-hand with them to onboard their service, gathering constant feedback to refine the developer experience, improve documentation, and harden the platform's capabilities.
Scale, Evangelize & Empower (Weeks 11+)
With a successful pilot, we help you scale. This involves building out more golden paths, enhancing the developer portal, and evangelizing the platform's benefits across the organization. We focus on comprehensive training and documentation to empower your team to take full ownership.
Success Stories in Platform Engineering
See how we've helped organizations like yours transform their development lifecycle, boost productivity, and accelerate innovation.
Accelerating Secure Deployments for a FinTech Innovator
"CIS didn't just build us a CI/CD pipeline; they built us a secure superhighway to production. Our deployment frequency went up 10x, and our security team can finally sleep at night. It's been a complete game-changer for our ability to compete."
- Alex Royce, VP of Engineering, FinSecure Payments
Client Overview
FinSecure Payments is a rapidly growing FinTech company providing real-time payment processing solutions. As they scaled, their manual, inconsistent deployment process became a major bottleneck and a significant security risk, threatening their ability to innovate and meet stringent compliance requirements.
The Problem
Each new microservice required weeks of manual setup for infrastructure, CI/CD, and security scanning. This slowed down feature delivery and led to inconsistent security postures across their services, creating a high-risk environment for a company handling sensitive financial data.
Key Challenges
- Deployment lead time exceeding 4 weeks for new services.
- Inconsistent security controls and manual compliance checks.
- High cognitive load on developers, who had to be DevOps experts.
- Inability to scale their engineering team effectively.
Our Solution
We partnered with FinSecure to build an Internal Developer Platform focused on a secure "golden path" for their Java/Spring Boot microservices.
- Implemented a GitOps workflow using Terraform and ArgoCD for declarative infrastructure.
- Engineered a standardized CI/CD pipeline with integrated SAST, DAST, and SCA scanning.
- Developed a Backstage developer portal for service scaffolding and visibility.
- Automated evidence collection for compliance audits.
Unifying Development for a Global Enterprise Retailer
"We had dozens of teams using dozens of different toolchains. It was chaos. CIS helped us build a common platform that provided consistency and guardrails without stifling the autonomy of our teams. Onboarding a new developer now takes a day, not a month."
- Amelia Norton, CTO, OmniRetail Corp
Client Overview
OmniRetail Corp is a Fortune 500 retailer with a massive, distributed engineering organization supporting hundreds of applications, from legacy e-commerce platforms to modern cloud-native services. This fragmentation led to massive inefficiencies and duplicated effort.
The Problem
The lack of a standardized platform meant every team reinvented the wheel for infrastructure, monitoring, and deployments. This created huge operational overhead, inconsistent reliability, and made it nearly impossible to onboard new engineers or share best practices across the organization.
Key Challenges
- Extreme tool and process fragmentation across teams.
- 30+ day average onboarding time for new engineers.
- High operational costs due to duplicated infrastructure and effort.
- Inconsistent application of security and reliability standards.
Our Solution
We designed and implemented a multi-cloud Internal Developer Platform to serve as a common foundation for all of OmniRetail's engineering teams.
- Created a unified developer portal in Backstage to catalog all services and documentation.
- Engineered "golden paths" for their primary tech stacks (.NET and Node.js).
- Built a shared infrastructure library of reusable Terraform modules.
- Established a central Platform Engineering team and an InnerSource contribution model.
Enabling HIPAA Compliance by Default for a Healthcare SaaS
"For us, security and compliance are non-negotiable. The platform CIS built for us automates 90% of our HIPAA controls within the CI/CD pipeline. Our developers can now move fast without us having to worry about compliance risks. It's the definition of 'paved road'."
- Carter Fleming, Director of Platform Engineering, MedRecord Solutions
Client Overview
MedRecord Solutions provides a cloud-based Electronic Health Record (EHR) platform to hospitals and clinics. Maintaining HIPAA compliance was a slow, manual, and error-prone process that was severely limiting their ability to release new features for their customers.
The Problem
Every code change required a lengthy manual review by the compliance team. The development process was plagued by fear of audit failures, and developers were spending a significant amount of time on compliance-related tasks instead of building features.
Key Challenges
- Long and stressful pre-release compliance reviews.
- High risk of human error leading to compliance violations.
- Developer velocity crippled by compliance overhead.
- Difficulty producing evidence for HIPAA audits.
Our Solution
We built a HIPAA-compliant "golden path" on AWS that baked in security and compliance from the very beginning.
- Used Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to ensure all environments were provisioned with HIPAA-compliant configurations.
- Integrated policy-as-code (OPA) checks into the CI pipeline to block non-compliant changes.
- Automated the generation of audit trails and compliance evidence.
- Provided developers with a self-service way to provision secure, compliant infrastructure.
Our Technology & Tooling Expertise
We build modern platforms using a best-of-breed, open-source-first approach. We have deep expertise across the entire cloud-native ecosystem.
Meet Our Platform Engineering Experts
Our teams are composed of certified cloud architects, SREs, and DevOps specialists who have built and scaled platforms for some of the world's most demanding technology organizations.
What Our Clients Say
"The Internal Developer Platform CIS built for us reduced our developers' cognitive load immensely. They can now focus on writing business logic instead of YAML files. Our feature velocity has easily doubled."
"We treated platform engineering as a side project for years and got nowhere. Bringing in CIS was the best decision we made. They brought structure, expertise, and a product mindset that was infectious. We now have a platform that is a true asset to the company."
"The 'golden path' concept was a revelation. Our junior developers are now as productive as our seniors on day one because the platform provides all the guardrails and best practices automatically. It's been a huge win for talent development."
Flexible Engagement Models
We tailor our engagement to fit your specific needs, whether you need a full-scale platform build, expert guidance, or to augment your existing team.
Dedicated Platform Team (POD)
We provide a fully-managed, cross-functional team of platform engineers, SREs, and a product manager to own and deliver your IDP roadmap as a cohesive unit.
Project-Based Implementation
Have a specific outcome in mind, like building a developer portal or a specific golden path? We can deliver a well-defined project with a fixed scope, timeline, and budget.
Team Augmentation & Enablement
Embed our expert platform engineers directly into your existing teams to accelerate your initiatives, fill skill gaps, and upskill your staff through direct collaboration and knowledge transfer.
Frequently Asked Questions
We specialize in a pragmatic, phased approach. We don't recommend a "big bang" project. Instead, we work with you to identify the single most impactful area of developer friction and build the "Thinnest Viable Platform" to solve that first. This delivers tangible ROI in a few months, not years, allowing you to fund subsequent phases with the value you've already created. Our AI-enabled accelerators also significantly reduce the manual effort involved, lowering the total cost of ownership compared to a purely manual build-out.
Quite the opposite. A well-designed IDP handles the 80% of undifferentiated heavy lifting (like setting up infrastructure, CI/CD, monitoring) through automated "golden paths." This frees your most creative engineers from reinventing the wheel and allows them to focus their brainpower on the complex 20%—the unique business logic and innovative features that actually differentiate your product in the market. It's about paving the roads so your best drivers can go faster.
You certainly could, but the critical question is opportunity cost. Building a robust IDP is a complex product development effort that can easily tie up your best engineers for 12-18 months. During that time, they aren't building customer-facing features. We've built dozens of these platforms. We bring battle-tested blueprints, CMMI Level 5 process maturity, and an understanding of the common pitfalls, allowing us to deliver a production-ready platform in a fraction of the time and at a lower total cost.
This is the most important question, and our answer is simple: we treat your developers as our customers. Our process is built around a "Platform as a Product" mindset. We conduct user interviews, create developer journey maps, and gather constant feedback from pilot teams. The platform succeeds only if it's demonstrably easier, faster, and safer than the old way of doing things. Adoption becomes a natural pull, not a top-down push.
Absolutely not. Our philosophy is built on empowerment and open standards. We primarily use best-in-class open-source tools like Backstage, Kubernetes, Terraform, and ArgoCD. Our engagement model is focused on enabling your team to take full ownership. We provide extensive documentation, training, and pair programming, and at the end of the project, you receive 100% of the intellectual property. Our goal is to make you self-sufficient, not dependent.
Ready to Build Your Developer Superhighway?
Let's talk about your current challenges and map out a pragmatic roadmap for your Internal Developer Platform. Schedule a free, no-obligation consultation with our platform architects today.
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