We Engineer the Systems
Nobody Else Will Touch.
Frontier Labs is a software consultancy that specializes in distributed architectures, AI-native orchestration, and compliance-grade engineering. We build the infrastructure layer your business runs on.
Three Pillars of Pain
We Actually Enjoy.
Most shops cherry-pick the easy stuff. We run toward the gnarly problems — the ones with twelve moving parts, regulatory landmines, and "the last team quit" energy.
Distributed Systems &
Platform Engineering
We design and ship polyglot microservice architectures with event-driven choreography, saga-based transaction management, and domain-driven patterns that actually hold up under load.
AI-Native
Workflows
Multi-provider LLM orchestration isn't a demo with a ChatGPT wrapper. We build production agentic pipelines — retrieval-augmented generation, tool-use chains, vision model integration, and human-in-the-loop guardrails that won't hallucinate your compliance away.
Compliance-Grade
Engineering
Fintech. Enterprise. Regulated industries where "move fast and break things" gets you a lawsuit. We architect audit-ready systems with immutable event logs, deterministic state machines, and policy engines that your auditors will actually understand.
Opinions We'll Defend
in Production.
"Most AI integrations are demos held together with duct tape."
We've seen the graveyard: LangChain spaghetti, prompt injection vulnerabilities, embedding stores with no eval pipeline, and "AI features" that are just a raw API call with a spinner. We build the production version — with circuit breakers, fallback chains, cost controls, and deterministic output guarantees.
"If your architecture diagram fits on a napkin, you haven't thought hard enough."
Real systems have failure modes, backpressure, state management, and twelve different "what happens when this goes down" scenarios. We don't simplify complexity away — we tame it with saga orchestration, domain modeling, and observability that actually tells you what's happening at 3 AM.
"Compliance isn't a checkbox. It's an architecture decision."
You can't bolt SOC 2 onto a dumpster fire. Immutable audit logs, deterministic state transitions, and proper access control boundaries need to be load-bearing walls — not wallpaper. We architect compliance into the domain model from day one, so your auditor isn't your enemy.
"Requirements change. That's not a bug — it's the whole point."
We're RFC-driven, not waterfall-brained. We listen. We iterate fast. We understand that you're still figuring out the best way to achieve your goals and make things user-friendly — because so are we. Changing requirements isn't scope creep, it's the product getting smarter. Our job is to build architectures that embrace that reality instead of crumbling under it.
From RFC to Runbook.
No Handwaving.
Every engagement follows a disciplined pipeline. No "agile theater." Just clear deliverables at every checkpoint.
Discovery
Architecture review, threat modeling, constraint mapping, stakeholder interviews. We reverse-engineer what you have, identify the load-bearing assumptions, and map the blast radius of every proposed change.
Design
RFC-driven design with formal review. Contract-first API specs (OpenAPI / AsyncAPI / Protobuf). Data flow diagrams. Failure mode analysis. We design for the 3 AM pager scenario, not just the happy path.
Build
Trunk-based development, CI/CD from the first commit, feature flags for progressive rollout. Every PR gets reviewed against the RFC. Integration tests hit real infrastructure, not mocks. We don't ship what we can't observe.
Ship
Canary deployments with automated rollback. SLO-driven alerting. Structured runbooks for every failure scenario. We hand over systems that your team can actually operate — not a black box that only we understand.
Polyglot by Conviction.
Not by Accident.
We pick the right tool for the problem domain — not whatever's trending on Hacker News this week.
Languages & Runtimes
Cloud & Infrastructure
AI / ML
Data & Messaging
Observability & DevOps
An Engineer and a Product Lead
Who Got Tired of Watching Projects Fail.
We've collectively spent decades shipping high-stakes systems at scale. Now we do it for companies that can't afford to get it wrong.
Clayton Perkins
Co-Founder / CPO
Product leader who's spent years in the trenches of eCommerce, OMS, and complex integration ecosystems. Knows how to translate messy business requirements into systems that actually ship value. The person who makes sure we're building the right thing — not just building the thing right.
Roland Li
Co-Founder / CTO
Fintech engineer turned systems architect. Deep background in compliance-grade infrastructure, multi-provider LLM orchestration, and agentic AI workflows. Builds the hard parts — distributed transaction systems, audit-ready pipelines, and production AI that doesn't hallucinate your compliance away.
Based in Utah. Deployed everywhere.
Got a System That
Needs Unfucking?
Whether it's a greenfield architecture, an AI integration that needs to actually work, or a compliance audit that's keeping you up at night — we should talk.
Prefer a direct line?
hello@frontierlabsusa.com