About
An engineering practice, not an agency.
Harness Consult exists because there is a widening gap between teams who can call a model API and teams who can run one in production, at scale, inside their constraints. That gap is infrastructure work, and it is what we do.
The practice
What we are.
We are a small, senior team that works on a few engagements at a time. There is no bench of juniors behind this and no pyramid to feed — the people who scope your work are the people who do it.
We are vendor-independent by construction: no reseller agreements, no referral fees, no partner tiers. Nobody pays us to recommend them, which is what makes it worth asking us what to use. Frequently the answer is the thing you are already paying for.
We take a narrow view of our job. We are not a data science team, we will not build your product, and we are not your MLOps department. We make language models run properly in production and then leave your engineers able to keep them that way.
Fit
Who this is for.
Being specific about this saves everyone a call. If the right column describes you, we are probably not the right people — and we would rather say so now.
A good fit
- You have a language model in production, or a firm date to get one there.
- Someone senior owns the outcome and can make architectural decisions.
- You want your team to own the result, not to rent ours indefinitely.
- You would rather hear a measurement than a recommendation.
Probably not
- You want a proof of concept to show a board next month.
- You are looking for staff augmentation by the seat.
- The decision has already been made and you need it validated.
- You want someone to own it permanently so your team does not have to.
How we operate
Four commitments.
Measure first
No recommendation before a baseline. Teams routinely optimise the wrong thing for a quarter because nobody put a number on it in week one.
Your repo, your cloud
Work lands in your infrastructure, your IaC and your review process from day one. Nothing of consequence should live on a consultant's laptop.
The boring answer, when it's right
Frequently the correct advice is a cache, a shorter prompt, or staying on the API you already pay for. We would rather be useful than interesting.
Leave the team stronger
Success is your engineers operating this confidently without us. We are a temporary function by design.
Ask us something specific.
The best first message is a real problem: a latency target you're missing, a bill you can't explain, a constraint you can't design around. Vague enquiries get vague answers.