About Cinderway Cloud Works
We're a focused engineering studio founded to make cloud platforms calmer, safer, and easier to operate. We work with mid-market companies and SaaS teams building ambitious digital products.
Our story
Cinderway was founded by engineers who spent years in high-growth companies watching cloud adoptions go sideways. We'd see teams with talented engineers, solid products, and good intentions slowly suffocated by infrastructure that nobody fully understood—deployments that took weeks, cloud bills that made CFOs nervous, and oncall rotations that burned people out.
We realized the problem wasn't the cloud, it was the lack of intentional architecture. Most companies were treating cloud infrastructure as a technical detail to solve later. By the time they addressed it, patterns had calcified, tribal knowledge had scattered, and debt had accumulated.
We started Cinderway because we believed cloud platforms don't have to be that way. They can be designed with repeatability, observability, security, and operational ownership built-in from day one. And when they are, extraordinary things happen: teams move faster, engineers want to be on call, and the business stops treating cloud as a cost center and starts treating it as a competitive advantage.
That's what we do now. We partner with ambitious teams to architect platforms that scale with their business and make their engineers want to work there.
How we work
The values that guide every engagement and decision we make.
Technical clarity
We explain complex problems in plain language. Our work is transparent; we document decisions and trade-offs so your team understands the 'why' behind architecture choices.
Operational independence
The goal of every engagement is to leave your team capable and confident. We succeed when you don't need us anymore.
Measured skepticism
We question assumptions, including our own. We favor tested patterns and avoid fashionable technology choices that don't solve real problems.
Practical pragmatism
Perfect architectures exist only in papers. We design for the organization, tools, and constraints you actually have—and help you evolve from there.
Our team
Four engineers and operators who bring deep production experience to every project.
Mara Ellison
Founder & Principal Platform Architect
Spent a decade as a reliability lead at high-growth SaaS companies, where she learned that fragmented cloud estates are the enemy of team velocity. Mara designs cloud architectures that teams actually want to operate. When not architecting, she's documenting runbooks and teaching internal platform patterns.
Daniel Okafor
Director of Cloud Engineering
Daniel leads delivery across our migration and automation work. He has deep experience building and managing Kubernetes clusters at scale, and he believes infrastructure should be code, tested, and opinionated. He mentors our engineers and ensures every project ships with documentation your team can actually use.
Sophie Calder
Security & Resilience Lead
Sophie designs security controls and disaster recovery patterns for high-accountability environments. She translates compliance requirements into practical architectural patterns that don't slow down delivery. Her background in regulated financial services means she speaks both compliance and engineering fluently.
Evan Whitaker
Platform Enablement Manager
Evan helps organizations adopt new platform practices through structured enablement. He designs runbooks, leads workshops, and builds playbooks that teams keep referring to long after our engagement ends. He comes from startup operations backgrounds where doing more with smaller teams is a survival skill.
Let's talk about your platform
Whether you're just starting with cloud, modernizing an existing estate, or scaling a platform, we'd like to hear about what you're building.
Talk to an engineer