Senior engineers only. Security first. Outcomes over output.
NaughtyDevelopment is a boutique engineering consultancy founded in London in 2020. We work as a small network of senior associates — engineers with a decade or more of production experience, assembled per engagement and led by a single accountable principal. Remote-first across the UK, on-site when the work demands it. We stay deliberately small: every project gets people who have done it before, and nobody on your engagement is learning their craft at your expense.
No leverage model, no bench of juniors billed at senior rates. Small senior teams outship large mixed ones, and they leave less to maintain.
Least privilege, audit trails, and supply-chain hygiene are how we start, not what we add when a client asks. Most of our work lives in regulated industries; the habits travel everywhere.
We choose components whose failure modes are catalogued. Novelty is a cost we spend only where it buys a measurable outcome.
Every engagement starts with a number we agree to move and ends when it has moved. If we cannot measure it, we will not sell it.
Discover
2–4 weeks, fixed price. We read the code, interview the teams, measure the baseline, and write down what we would do and what it should achieve. You keep the findings either way — some discoveries end with us recommending you do not hire us.
Build
Two to four senior engineers embedded in your organisation — your repos, your standups, your incident channel. Production from the first month, progress reported against the numbers we agreed, not a slide deck.
Run
Handover is an engineering deliverable: runbooks, observability, SLOs, and your team trained to operate without us. We stay on a thin retainer if you want continuity — but the system must not need us.