Fractional DevOps for startups

Fast, secure, observable infrastructure without the enterprise headcount

A team of senior DevOps experts backed by a dev platform that runs on your own cloud, so your engineers ship product while your infrastructure stays governed, observable, and audit-ready. Month-to-month, on your stack.

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Developer productivity

CI/CD and infrastructure-as-code that make every deploy fast and repeatable, so your engineers build product instead of infrastructure.

Governance

Access, secrets, and environments are defined in code. Every infrastructure change is versioned and reviewed.

Observability

Monitoring, alerting, and logging built into every system, so you can see what is running and catch problems early.

Compliance

The infrastructure and development controls SOC2 requires, implemented by default and kept audit-ready.

What we do

DevOps, run for you

Everything between merge and production: built on your cloud, owned by you, operated by us.

Infrastructure & automation

Cloud-native infrastructure and automated workflows, codified as infrastructure-as-code so everything is versioned and reviewable.

CI/CD pipelines

Build and deploy pipelines that make shipping code simple and safe, with consistent behavior across every environment.

Reliability & observability

Monitoring, alerting, and the observability you need to operate confidently. You cannot run what you cannot see.

Security & governance

Encryption, access management, and secrets defined in code, with an audit trail for every infrastructure change.

Cost & performance

Right-size cloud spend and tune performance without trading away reliability.

Migrations

Move clouds, services, or data with a plan that protects integrity and minimizes downtime.

How it works

Flexible by design

Fractional DevOps is a managed service for engineering teams of 5–40 who can’t justify a full-time platform team. You get senior expertise and a platform, priced to match your stage.

Month-to-month

No long contract and no setup fee. Start small and scale up in the months you need more.

Work in buckets of hours

Hours are fungible across strategy, implementation, and support. Spend them on whatever moves the needle that month.

Unused hours roll over

A slow month isn’t wasted budget. Hours roll into the next month, so you’re never paying for capacity you didn’t use.

The platform is how we deliver, not another tool you have to run

We deliver through Nullstone, our dev platform. It runs on your existing AWS, GCP, or Azure accounts using your current stack. It accelerates and standardizes our work, and it means your infrastructure knowledge stays codified instead of walking out the door with a consultant. Your team doesn’t have to learn or operate it. Want the details? See the platform docs.

What working together looks like

A listening call, not a pitch

The first call is 30 minutes of understanding your situation: your stack, your team, what’s on fire. No slide deck.

See the platform

We show you how we deliver: a dev platform that runs on your existing cloud and codifies every decision, config, and workflow.

Start month-to-month

We agree on a starting bucket of hours and get to work. You keep full ownership of your infrastructure throughout.

Brad Sickles

Founder, Nullstone

Who you’re working with

Built by a team that’s done this at scale

We’ve built developer platforms where the stakes are high: an internal developer platform at McKinsey serving roughly 1,000 engineers and 300+ services, and a co-founded security platform at Bishop Fox that scaled to a billion operations a day. Each time, the lesson was the same: the difference between infrastructure that holds a company back and infrastructure that gets out of the way is a small team of people who really know how to build platforms.

Big companies can afford to hire that team. The startups we kept talking to couldn’t. They had five to forty engineers, real reliability and compliance pressure, and no way to justify a full-time platform hire. So they duct-taped it together and hoped. We started Nullstone to give those teams the same platform discipline we’d built for much larger organizations, delivered fractionally, on their own cloud, without the enterprise headcount.

McKinsey: IDP, ~1,000 engineers Bishop Fox: 1B ops/day

Why teams choose us

The expertise without the headcount

Right-sized expertise

You don’t need a full-time platform team. You need the right amount of senior expertise for your stage. A senior DevOps hire costs $200K+ and months to recruit; you get that expertise from day one.

A platform, not just a person

Consultants leave and knowledge walks out the door. Our platform captures every decision, config, and workflow, so there’s no single-person dependency and nothing is a black box.

Your cloud, your way

You keep full control of your AWS, GCP, or Azure accounts without the management burden. No PaaS, no lock-in, just well-architected infrastructure someone else keeps running.

Compliance

SOC2-ready when you need it

The same practices that keep infrastructure governed and observable are most of what SOC2 asks for. When an enterprise deal or your board makes it a requirement, we own the infrastructure and development controls and keep them audit-ready, so you’re not starting from scratch when the auditor shows up.

How we handle SOC2 for startups

What we own

Encryption, logging, access management, secrets, and audit trails, implemented by default
Infrastructure and development controls mapped to SOC2 requirements
Audit prep and evidence collection for the layers we operate

How we partner

Your compliance firm (or your team) owns business-wide policies and frameworks
We complete the implementation gap they don’t fill, without overlapping
Nullstone itself is SOC2-compliant, and we run on our own platform

Proof

How it’s played out

Two of the teams we’ve worked with, and what changed for them.

No-code platform · post-revenue · ~6–7 engineers

Falling behind on Kubernetes, shipping what customers demanded

Situation: A growing, post-revenue no-code platform vendor was behind on Kubernetes upgrades while their customers pushed for modernization: CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code, and reliability.
What we did: Caught up the Kubernetes upgrade backlog, built out CI/CD and infrastructure-as-code, and folded SOC2-relevant controls into the platform as the compliance need emerged.
Result: They met the modernization requirements their customers were asking for and got off the upgrade treadmill without adding a dedicated DevOps hire.

Fintech · funded seed · 4–5 → 7–8 engineers

Found us through ChatGPT, needed SOC2 yesterday

Situation: A pre-revenue, well-funded fintech startup was overwhelmed by GCP complexity (“infinite knobs”) and knew a DevOps hire was coming but couldn’t justify it yet. SOC2 was a hard requirement up front.
What we did: Stood up clean, codified infrastructure on their own GCP, and implemented the infrastructure and development controls SOC2 requires (encryption, access, logging, secrets, audit trails), kept audit-ready.
Result: The team stayed focused on building their product instead of fighting infrastructure, with a SOC2-ready foundation in place well before they were ready to hire a full-time platform engineer.

How we work

Principles that guide the work

A single pull request can launch a feature or fix a bug

Streamlined deployment so shipping code is simple and safe.

You build it, you run it

Ownership and accountability sit with the team that writes the code.

Manual work is a bug

Automation-first, to eliminate human error and reclaim time.

You cannot operate what you cannot observe

Monitoring and observability built into every system.

Every environment works the same

Consistent configuration across development, staging, and production.

Tools are not the objective

We optimize for outcomes and business value, not for any specific technology.

FAQ

Questions teams ask us

What does Fractional DevOps cover? +

Everything between merge and production, in four areas. Developer productivity: CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure-as-code that make deploys fast and repeatable. Governance: access, secrets, and environments defined in code, with every change versioned and reviewed. Observability: monitoring, alerting, and logging built into every system. Compliance: the infrastructure and development controls SOC2 requires, kept audit-ready. All of it runs on your own AWS, GCP, or Azure accounts.

What size team is Fractional DevOps a fit for? +

We work best with engineering teams of roughly 5 to 40 developers. Five developers is a practical floor, though we make exceptions for well-funded teams that are actively hiring toward it. Above about 40 engineers, most teams are ready for a dedicated platform hire, and we transition them to a platform-only relationship.

What does Fractional DevOps cost? +

Pricing is month-to-month and quote-on-request. We share specifics on a short discovery call rather than publishing a one-size-fits-all number. As a reference point, a fully loaded senior DevOps hire runs roughly $200K–$300K in the first year once you include recruiting and ramp; fractional typically costs a fraction of that. You pay for monthly buckets of hours, and unused hours roll over.

How does it work with our existing team and stack? +

We run on your existing AWS, GCP, or Azure accounts using your current stack. We do not move you onto a proprietary platform you have to operate. Our dev platform is how we deliver the work consistently and how the knowledge stays codified; your team keeps full ownership and visibility of the infrastructure. We complement your engineers rather than replacing them.

Can you help with SOC2? +

Yes. We implement and operate the infrastructure and development controls SOC2 requires (encryption, logging, access management, secrets, audit trails) and handle audit prep and evidence collection for those layers. Your compliance firm or team owns the business-wide policies and frameworks; we close the implementation gap they do not fill. Nullstone is itself SOC2-compliant.

What happens if we outgrow you? +

That is a success, not a problem. As teams pass roughly 40 engineers they usually want a dedicated DevOps or platform engineer in-house. When that happens we hand off cleanly and keep providing the underlying platform on a subscription, so nothing your new hire inherits is a black box.

Ready to take infrastructure off your plate?

Book a 30-minute discovery call. It’s a listening call: we’ll talk through your stack and where you’re stuck, no slide deck required.

Book Discovery Call