Independent practitioners

Experienced people, contracted individually.

Calam Consultancy is a small network of practitioners who have spent their careers building, fixing and running software systems. Tell us the problem, and we put you in touch with the person who has solved it before.

We work independently, and we know each other well enough to know who is actually good at what. If the right person is not one of us, we will say so and point you to someone better.

admin@calamconsultancy.com

Three steps, no account management.

How it works

01
Describe the problem

A paragraph in an email is enough to start. What is broken, what you have tried, and roughly when it needs to be different.
02
We name the right person

Someone who has done this specific thing before — not the person who happens to be free. If nobody here fits, you get a recommendation instead of a pitch.
03
They work with you directly

An individual contract, on your terms and inside your tools. A few days of review, a fixed piece of work, or an ongoing part-time engagement.

Problems we have worked on before.

Where we can help

Regulated platforms & data protection

UK GDPR and DPA 2018, KCSIE, the ICO Children's Code, PECR. DPIAs, ROPA, consent models, subject access requests, retention and erasure, field-level encryption, audit trails, WCAG 2.1 AA.

Architecture & system design

Schema and data modelling, multi-tenant isolation, API contracts and OpenAPI specifications, non-functional requirements, data classification, and architecture documentation people will read.

Cloud migration & modernisation

AWS, Azure and GCP. Migrations without downtime, monoliths broken into services that survive a roadmap, observability a team keeps using, and cloud spend brought back under control.

Integration with entrenched systems

Connecting to the third-party platforms your sector is stuck with — school MIS, transport management systems, financial platforms — with the ETL, taxonomies and data-quality work that comes attached.

AI adoption inside engineering teams

Where AI genuinely helps and where it does not. Prompt and context engineering, LLM security against the OWASP LLM Top 10, a maturity assessment, and enablement that survives the first month.

AI systems in production

Retrieval and agent pipelines, MCP integrations, model selection and cost control, evaluation and guardrails — past the pilot and into something you can actually run.

Legacy & undocumented systems

Reverse engineering and decompilation, reconstructing readable source and behaviour from binaries, and documenting the systems nobody in the building owns any more.

Delivery, release & incident governance

Out-of-cycle release review, incident response runbooks and severity models, sprint and board analytics, and the unglamorous work of making delivery dates mean something.

Building engineering organisations

Hiring, offshore centre build-out, the leadership bench, retention, and the cultural plumbing between time zones. Done at scale, including one centre built to 190 people.

Security, testing & assurance

Dynamic application security testing, penetration test coordination and remediation, Cyber Essentials readiness, and test strategy that catches the things that actually break.

Technical due diligence

An honest read on a codebase, a team or a platform before you invest in it, acquire it, or commit a roadmap to it. Written for the person making the decision.

Product strategy & go-to-market

Positioning for technical products, competitive analysis, launch planning and the material sales actually uses. Grounded in evidence, with the guesses labelled as guesses.

How we work

What to expect, plainly.

You contract the individual, not a layer of management. Rates and terms are theirs, agreed with you directly.

Engagements start small. A few days of review before anyone commits to a programme of work.

Remote by default, on your tools and inside your process. On-site where it genuinely helps.

We will tell you when the honest answer is that you do not need us, or need someone else.

No bench to keep busy, so no incentive to stretch a piece of work past its usefulness.

Who you will hear from first

Srinivasan Subramanian

Twenty years in engineering leadership, most recently six of them as CTO of a freight technology company, and before that leading platform and transformation work in healthcare and financial services. I have hired, scaled, migrated, restructured and occasionally rescued engineering organisations, and I still write code most weeks.

Calam Consultancy is how I take work on now, and how I pass it to the right person when that person is not me.

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Get in touch

Tell us what you are trying to solve.