Fractional CTO & Technical Leadership
Strategic technical direction without a full-time hire — roadmap, hiring, and the hard trade-offs, from someone who's shipped.
Technical Advisory & Architecture
A steady hand for your hardest technical decisions.
Cabrillo Coast is a boutique software consultancy on the California coast. We help founders and engineering teams navigate architecture, scale, and the calls that are expensive to get wrong — with senior, vendor-neutral judgment.
- 30 years' experience
- Vendor-neutral
- Outcome-focused
What we do
Advisory that moves the big decisions in the right direction.
Most costly software problems are decisions, not bugs — the wrong boundary, the premature rewrite, the platform you can't leave. We help you make those calls with clarity, and stand behind them.
System & Software Architecture
Design systems that scale with your business, not against it. Service boundaries, data models, and the structural decisions worth getting right the first time.
Architecture & Code Review
An independent read on your systems — where the risk lives, what's slowing you down, and what to fix first. Clear findings, prioritized and practical.
Technical Due Diligence
For investors, acquirers, and partners: a rigorous assessment of a target's technology, team, and technical debt — so there are no surprises after close.
Team Mentoring & Enablement
Level up your engineers and establish the practices that outlast any single project — review culture, standards, and confident decision-making.
Cloud & Platform Strategy
Right-size your infrastructure and platform decisions — cost, reliability, and lock-in — matched to where your product actually is today.
AI & Agentic Systems
Agentic development — with judgment, not just hype.
The teams pulling ahead aren't the ones with the most AI. They're the ones who wired it in deliberately — with the guardrails and evals to actually trust it. That's the work we do.
Agentic development
Design and ship LLM-powered agents — in your product and in your codebase — with the guardrails, evals, and human-in-the-loop escalation that make them dependable, not just demos.
Agentic workflows
Reshape how your team builds: coding agents, automated review loops, and orchestration that compress cycle time without loosening the bar on correctness.
Domain-specific harnesses
Custom eval, test, and simulation harnesses tuned to your domain — so agents and engineers alike get caught by the edge cases that generic tools sail right past.
Signature practice
Human–agent team topology
Adding AI agents to a team isn't an org-chart footnote — it's a redesign. We map who does what, where judgment lives, and how work and authority flow between people and agents — so AI makes your team faster and safer, not just louder.
- Deliberate rolesPeople where judgment and accountability matter; agents where leverage and tireless throughput pay off.
- Explicit review gates & escalationEvery agent output has an owner and a path up — no unreviewed work reaching production, no ambiguous authority.
- Runnable, not theoreticalThe topology ships with the harnesses, guardrails, and evals that keep it honest as it scales.
How we work
Plainspoken advice, anchored in what you're actually building.
No frameworks for their own sake, no vendor agendas. We learn your context, name the real trade-offs, and give you a recommendation you can act on — then help you land it.
Book an intro call-
01
Get our bearings
A focused discovery into your product, team, constraints, and the decision in front of you.
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02
Chart the options
The realistic paths, each with its trade-offs made explicit — cost, risk, and time to value.
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03
Recommend a course
A clear, defensible recommendation — not a menu — written down so your whole team can align.
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04
Help you land it
Hands-on support through the parts that matter, so the decision survives contact with reality.
About
Named for the coast we navigate from.
Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo charted this coastline without a map. Building software can feel the same way — the terrain is unfamiliar, the stakes are real, and confident navigation matters more than raw speed.
Cabrillo Coast LLC is a boutique advisory practice for teams building serious software. We bring senior, hands-on experience to the decisions that shape a system for years — and we're small on purpose, so the person you talk to is the person doing the work.
Led by Randy Miller — 30 years in software and cloud architecture: global high-availability systems, SRE, evergreen operations, and domain-specific languages, with a current focus on the topological design of high-performing human–agent teams.
Get in touch
Have a decision you'd rather not get wrong?
Tell us a little about what you're building and where you're stuck. We reply to every serious inquiry, usually within a business day.
Prefer email? hello@cabrillocoast.com