№ 3 · consulting · for software companies
Fractional engineering operations for growing software companies: release strategy, FinOps, and the discipline to ship without heroics. About two days a week, from someone who has run this at Fortune-100 scale.
from $6k/mo · audits from $15k · playbooks stay with you
release strategy
A release calendar you can promise customers. CI/CD, environments, and rollback plans, so a release stops being an event.
FinOps
Cloud and vendor spend audited, tagged, and cut. Cost visibility your CFO can read; unit economics your engineers act on.
ops, end to end
Incident process, on-call sanity, vendor wrangling: the operational spine a growing product needs, without a full-time hire.
The AI delivery engine
The newer work: standing up an AI-first delivery model, where agents own the parts of planning, building, testing, and shipping they can be trusted with, and people own the judgment. I work with leadership to decide what to automate and what to keep human, choose the tooling to run it, and follow a phased roadmap that gets there without betting the company on it. Not a factory with the lights off — a small team that delivers like a much larger one.
Not sure it's ops?
Start with the audit: two weeks, a written findings report, and a prioritized fix list you keep either way. Audits from $15k, fixed.
craig@steadfastwork.com · Indianapolis, IN · © 2026 · steady is a strategy