Plain over clever.
A boring stack you understand will outlive a clever stack you don't. We pick the version of the problem the next engineer can read.
02 / About
Fractional engineering for founders
An experienced engineer — part-time, on-demand, only when you need one.
Pemi
/ˈpɛm.i/
noun · short for Pemigewasset
01The 65-mile river that cuts through the heart of the White Mountains in New Hampshire.
02From the Abenaki bemijijoasek — “where the side current enters” — the place a tributary joins the main stem.
03The shape we'd like our work to take — patient, accumulating, joining yours where it has to.
01
Why we exist
You need an
experienced engineer.
You don't need
to hire one.
Most founders who need engineering help don't need it full-time. They need it for a question, a plan, or a project — and then they need the meter to turn off.
Hiring an experienced engineer full-time is the heaviest move on the board: a salary, equity, payroll, benefits, onboarding, and a year of management overhead before you know if the call was right. Most growing businesses can't make that move yet. Many shouldn't.
Whether you're automating an online business that's growing faster than you can keep up with, hardening something AI helped you ship, or staring at a tech decision with no one senior to call — the work is the same. Read the situation, write the plan, pick up the tools when it's time. That's fractional engineering.
We built the studio so you can hire the work without hiring the person.
02
Why the name
Engineered
like a river.
The Pemigewasset doesn't move fast. It moves continuously. The contour of the river you see today is the result of every spring melt that ever passed through it, layered on every winter that froze over it. Nothing about it is rushed. Almost everything about it is permanent.
That's how we want fractional work to feel — small in any one moment, accumulating over time. A memo that settles a decision. A plan a developer can build from. A piece of code that holds up after we leave. Patient, on a calendar a founder can afford.
03
How we operate
Small on purpose.
Pemi Labs is a small practice in New Hampshire — run hands-on by an engineer with ten-plus years across backend, devops, and full engineering ownership at a working software business. This is the fractional side of that practice.
If you're a client, you have the email of the engineer doing the work. If you're not yet a client, the first call is with the same person. The “we” on the rest of the site is a studio voice; the practice is deliberately small.
We take on three engagements at a time. That number isn't aspirational — it's the number where every client still gets an experienced engineer's attention every week. When the practice is full, we say so. When a seat opens, we say when.
No decks. Memos and PRs. Read the memo, merge the PR, decide what's next. Everything is reviewable on its own terms.
04
Principles
Four things
we believe.
Write it down.
If a decision isn't in a doc, it didn't happen. We leave a trail — charters, memos, postmortems — that an LLM can read and a junior engineer can understand.
Ship to learn.
Production teaches faster than the staging environment. We get something real in users' hands by week two, and let what comes back shape week three.
Hand it off clean.
The best compliment a client gives us is the one they never have to give — because their team can carry the work after we leave, without asking how.
05
The studio, by the numbers
Small, written down,
and on the level.
Engagements at once
3max
Intro call
30min, free
Scope before work
Alwayswritten
Retainers
0none
06 / Start
If fractional engineering