API & Platform Engineering
Clean, versioned, well-documented APIs your front-end and partners actually enjoy building on.
Backend & Infrastructure Studio
We build the systems that don’t go down.
Isle is a small, senior team of backend engineers. We design distributed systems, ship resilient APIs, and run the infrastructure underneath them — so your product stays fast under load and online when it matters.
99.99%
Uptime delivered
across operated systems
8B+
Requests / month
served in production
< 40ms
p99 latency
on core API paths
12
Years average
engineering experience
01 — Services
What we build & run.
Backend systems end-to-end — from the API surface down to the metal it runs on.
Distributed Systems & Data
Event-driven architectures, data models and storage that stay correct and fast as you grow.
Cloud, DevOps & SRE
Reproducible infrastructure, safe deploys and the observability to sleep through the night.
Performance & Scaling
We profile before we optimise, then remove the bottleneck that actually matters.
Security & Compliance
Threat modelling, zero-trust internals and audit-ready controls baked in, not bolted on.
Real-time & Streaming
Low-latency pipelines, change-data-capture and websockets that hold up under real traffic.
02 — Selected work
Systems in production.
Distributed Systems
Re-architecting a payments platform for 50k rps
A ledger and gateway rebuild that took a strained monolith to 50,000 requests per second with money-grade correctness.
50k rps sustained throughput
99.99% uptime
−68% p99 latency
Data & Streaming
A real-time analytics pipeline at 8 billion events a day
Ingest, enrich and serve 8B events per day with sub-two-second freshness and no data loss.
8B/day events ingested
<2s end-to-end lag
0 events dropped
Cloud & DevOps
A zero-downtime monolith to microservices migration
Strangler-fig migration of a decade-old monolith into 140+ services — with zero customer-facing downtime.
0 downtime minutes
140+ services shipped
3× deploy frequency
Distributed Systems
Multi-region failover for a global API
Active-active across three regions with automatic failover measured in seconds, not hours.
<30s recovery time
3 active regions
99.995% availability
03 — About
Senior engineers, embedded like a team you already trust.
We are not a body shop. Isle is a tight group of backend specialists who have run systems at scale and know what breaks at 3am. We work in small, accountable teams, write code your engineers are happy to own, and leave you with infrastructure you understand.
-
01
Design for failure
Every system we ship assumes the network, the disk and the dependency will fail — and stays up anyway.
-
02
Measure, then cut
We profile before we optimise. No guessing, no premature abstractions — just the bottleneck that actually matters.
-
03
Own the operations
Code that runs in production is code we can observe, alert on and recover. Runbooks, dashboards and SLOs come standard.
-
04
Leave it better
We hand back documented, tested systems your team can extend without us. No lock-in, no black boxes.
04 — Team
Senior engineers, no hand-offs.
The people who write your code are the people who run it.
Mara Stein
Principal Engineer & Founder
Twenty years building payments and data infrastructure. Has been paged at 3am so you don’t have to be.
Daniel Okafor
Staff Backend Engineer
Distributed systems specialist. Loves a hard consistency problem and a clean state machine.
Yuki Tanaka
Site Reliability Engineer
Turns flaky production into boring production. Lives in dashboards, alerts and runbooks.
Liam Novak
Data Platform Engineer
Builds streaming pipelines that move billions of events without losing one of them.
Sofia Reyes
Security Engineer
Breaks systems on purpose so attackers can’t. SOC 2 and HIPAA programs, end to end.
05 — Contact
Tell us what you’re building.
Send a few lines about your system and where it hurts. We reply to every serious enquiry within two business days.
hello@isle-me.site