Platform engineering
Landing zones, internal developer platforms, and the day-two operations that follow.
Chapter 01 — The firm
A studio that prefers a long, accurate answer to a short, confident one.
TOOKI’S LIMITED was founded in 2019 in Cardiff by four engineers who had spent the previous decade rebuilding other people’s systems after they failed in production. We started the firm to do that work properly the first time — and to stay accountable for the platforms we ship.
Seven years later we operate as an independent engineering studio across the United Kingdom, the European Union and East Africa. We remain founder-owned, deliberately small, and entirely free of cloud reseller margins or affiliate revenue.
02 — Origins
How we came to exist.
The founding team had collectively spent the years before 2019 inside large consultancies, an investment bank, and two unicorn-sized scale-ups. Each had watched competent engineering teams be slowed by procurement processes, vanity tooling and the quiet erosion of accountability that happens when a project passes through too many hands.
The premise of the firm was simple: assemble a small group of senior engineers, refuse to grow faster than the work demanded, and write down what we were doing as we went. Most of what looks like methodology here is a direct consequence of that early discipline.
The first engagement was a ledger migration for a regional payments processor. We finished it on time and ahead of budget, and the client renewed for a second project before we had invoiced the first. We have not had to do business development since.
03 — The people
Eighty-four engineers. Six leaders. One handbook.
We are organised as a partnership rather than a hierarchy. Our six practice leads are accountable for the discipline of their craft, not for headcount or revenue. Every engineer reports first to the project and second to the practice.
Hiring is slow on purpose. The average successful candidate joins fourteen weeks after their first conversation with us. Tenure is correspondingly long: the median engineer has been here for six years.
04 — Our practices
Six disciplines, each with a written standard.
Product engineering
Web and mobile product work where design and engineering are run as a single discipline.
Data engineering
Warehousing, contract-tested pipelines and the analytics layer that finance teams will actually trust.
Applied machine learning
Evaluation, retrieval, fine-tuning and the routing layer between them.
Security engineering
Identity, secrets, supply chain and the audit work that turns paperwork into code.
Reliability engineering
SLOs, capacity planning, incident response and the structured post-mortems that follow.
05 — Leadership
A partnership, not a corporate ladder.
The firm is governed by its six practice leads and its three founding partners. There is no sales organisation. There are no quarterly growth targets. Decisions about hiring, pricing and engagement portfolio are made openly by the partnership at a standing Friday meeting.
We have refused work in every year of the firm’s existence. Most often because we could not staff it without compromising another engagement; occasionally because the work was not honest enough for us to put our name on it.
06 — How we measure ourselves
Renewal rate, not revenue rate.
- 94%
- Of clients renew or extend within twelve months of the first engagement.
- 86%
- Of revenue comes from relationships in their third year or beyond.
- 0
- Engagements terminated for cause in the firm’s history.
- 6 yrs
- Median engineer tenure inside the firm.
07 — A note from the partners
“We have spent seven years building a firm we would have wanted to work for, and a portfolio of platforms we would be happy to inherit. The next decade is about doing more of that, more carefully, with the same people.”
— The partnership, written collectively, January 2026