Architecture assessment
Evaluate current architecture, risks, constraints, dependencies, ownership gaps, operating model, and decision debt before major product, platform, modernization, or investment choices.
Senior architecture consulting
Resolve high-stakes architecture decisions before they become delivery, scale, or alignment problems.
Resolving Architecture helps CTOs, founders, engineering leaders, and architecture teams make defensible technology decisions when modernization, integration, reliability, security, scale, governance, or product direction are on the line.
25+ years
Principal-level architecture and software delivery experience across startups, growth-stage companies, regulated environments, enterprise platforms, and complex integration contexts.
Governance
Established architecture direction, decision structures, role clarity, data classification review, and lightweight governance practices for teams needing accountability without unnecessary process.
Transition
Converted current-state architecture, legacy integrations, platform constraints, and stakeholder concerns into practical target-state recommendations and modernization transition plans.
The problem
Architecture risk usually appears as a business problem first.
Missed delivery dates, fragile integrations, scaling limits, unclear ownership, security gaps, operational surprises, and stakeholder disagreement often trace back to architecture decisions that were never made clearly enough.
Resolving Architecture turns scattered context into explicit trade-offs, practical options, accountable decisions, and implementation guardrails your teams can actually use.
Consulting
Focused architecture support where senior judgment matters.
Use Resolving Architecture when the cost of the wrong decision is high and your team needs independent, practical architecture leadership without adding unnecessary process.
Modernization strategy
Define practical transition paths from current state to target state without creating avoidable rewrite risk, delivery disruption, or platform churn.
Application and platform architecture
Clarify boundaries, service responsibilities, platform capabilities, domain ownership, integration points, and implementation guardrails for systems expected to grow.
Integration architecture
Design API, event, workflow, third-party, data movement, and operational integration patterns that reduce coupling and improve reliability.
Architecture decision facilitation
Help technical and business stakeholders compare options, expose trade-offs, agree on rationale, and record decisions before implementation momentum hides unresolved disagreement.
Resilience and operability review
Review systems against reliability, observability, incident recovery, supportability, performance constraints, and operational ownership.
Security and compliance alignment
Evaluate architecture implications for identity, access, data classification, privacy, auditability, security boundaries, and compliance readiness.
Architecture governance
Establish lightweight decision records, review practices, architecture baselines, and governance loops that help teams preserve design intent as systems evolve.
Representative engagements
Architecture decisions resolved across complex technology environments.
Selected engagements include fintech, healthcare, enterprise integration, national identity, retail modernization, data architecture, product architecture, and decentralized systems.
Unchained
Architecture evaluation for collaborative Bitcoin custody, including enterprise architecture chartering, data classification review, domain-boundary guidance, reliability recommendations, and observability direction.
First American Title
Reverse-engineered a hub-and-spoke integration architecture into documented integration patterns and transition-plan recommendations for moving toward a more service-oriented integration model.
SofTechnics / Mettler-Toledo
Led architecture for replacing long-running retail applications with SOA-based service infrastructure supporting enterprise decision management and performance management initiatives.
Veterans Health Administration
Led design and prototype work for authentication and authorization integration in a large national healthcare environment involving SSO, SAML, XACML, RBAC, PKI, and security architecture.
Why Resolving Architecture
Not staff augmentation. Not generic advisory. Architecture decisions made usable.
Many architecture efforts produce diagrams, opinions, or process without changing the quality of decisions. Resolving Architecture focuses on the decision itself: what must be true, who owns it, what trade-offs are accepted, what risks remain, and how implementation should stay aligned.
The goal is not to add ceremony. The goal is to help leaders make better technical commitments with clearer consequences, stronger stakeholder agreement, and artifacts that engineers can use.
Typical outputs
Clear artifacts that move teams from debate to decision.
Consulting work is shaped around practical outputs that help leaders align stakeholders, guide implementation, communicate with executives, and preserve decision rationale.
- Architecture assessment summaries
- Current-state and target-state architecture notes
- Risk, constraint, dependency, and ownership maps
- Trade-off comparisons for major options
- Architecture decision records
- Modernization and transition roadmaps
- Integration patterns and boundary recommendations
- Reliability, security, and operability review notes
- Implementation guardrails for engineering teams
- Executive-ready architecture communication
Engagement options
Clear ways to start, sized to the decision in front of you.
Engagements can be adjusted to your context, but most work starts with one of these practical shapes.
Architecture challenge review
A focused review for a specific decision, risk, design concern, or stakeholder disagreement. Best for leaders who need a senior second opinion before committing to a path.
Typical outputs: decision framing, trade-off notes, risk summary, recommended next steps.
Architecture assessment
A structured review of current architecture, constraints, delivery risks, integration concerns, reliability issues, security implications, and governance gaps.
Typical outputs: assessment summary, risk map, prioritized recommendations, decision backlog.
Modernization roadmap
A practical transition plan for moving from current state to target state while preserving delivery momentum and reducing rewrite risk.
Typical outputs: transition roadmap, sequencing options, dependency map, implementation guardrails.
Decision facilitation workshop
A guided working session for technical and business stakeholders who need to compare options, expose trade-offs, and agree on an accountable decision.
Typical outputs: option comparison, agreed rationale, decision record, follow-up actions.
Architecture governance setup
Lightweight governance for teams that need repeatable architecture evaluation without slowing engineering delivery.
Typical outputs: ADR structure, review loop, architecture baseline, guardrails, Meridian readiness.
Ongoing architecture advisory
Continued senior architecture support for CTOs, founders, VPs of Engineering, architecture groups, or product teams navigating a sequence of consequential decisions.
Typical outputs: recurring decision support, reviews, roadmap input, executive communication.
Meridian
When architecture decisions need to remain visible after the meeting ends.
Meridian is Resolving Architecture’s product for structured architecture governance. It helps teams evaluate architecture context, identify decisions, compare trade-offs, record accountable decisions, and monitor implementation against an architecture baseline.
Consulting helps make the decision clear. Meridian helps teams keep the decision usable as systems, code, documentation, and delivery pressure change.
Meridian assists; customer leaders decide. It is designed to support CTOs, architects, principal engineers, and engineering leaders without replacing their judgment.
Explore MeridianWhat happens next
A low-friction path from first conversation to useful architecture output.
The first step is a conversation about the architecture decision, risk, or transition in front of you. From there, the work is shaped around the smallest useful engagement that can create clarity.
- 1. Discuss the challenge: clarify the business context, technical concern, stakeholders, and urgency.
- 2. Frame the decision: identify what needs to be decided, what constraints matter, and what options exist.
- 3. Produce usable outputs: deliver assessment notes, decision records, roadmap guidance, or review findings.
- 4. Support execution: help teams preserve design intent through implementation, review, and governance.
Start a conversation
Bring senior architecture judgment to your next consequential technology decision.
If a platform, product, modernization, integration, reliability, security, or governance decision needs to be clearer before your team commits, Resolving Architecture can help.