// about
One principal. Twenty years.
Atinian is built around a single senior engineer: twenty years in fast-moving, regulated production environments — finance and energy trading, fintech, cybersecurity, consumer platforms. The person on the call is the person writing the code.
// the story
Built by the person who gets paged
Twenty years in environments where "theoretical" is not a word engineers use: PCI-compliant finance platforms with out-of-hours customer support, energy trading systems that can't miss a market open, delivery platforms shipping daily.
01 Production first
We don't have "enterprise experience" in the brochure sense. We have on-call and out-of-hours support experience — measured in years, incidents survived and postmortems written.
02 Small enough to care
One principal. No layers, no account managers, no handoffs. If something goes wrong at 02:00, the person answering is the one who wrote it — and they've read your codebase.
03 Evidence over opinion
We argue with numbers: SLOs, latency percentiles, cost per transaction. When we're wrong, the measurement says so — and we fix it in the system, not the slide deck.
04 We leave teams stronger
Leading Agile squads has been part of the job for years. Every engagement ends with your team able to run what we built, without us. Handover isn't a phase, it's the definition of done.
// the road so far
2005 → today
Into the code
From PHP to C#/.NET, landing in a PCI-compliant finance team. First lesson: production doesn't care about your plan.
Lead engineer, reporting to the CTO
Hired and managed a dev team after a restructure, and set the strategy for migrating a legacy codebase to cloud hosting.
Delivery at scale
Two and a half years on a major UK food delivery platform: event-based decoupling of verticals, geo-spatial search on Postgres/PostGIS, an engineering department award.
A digital bank
Portal authentication migrated to Entra ID with OIDC, zero-trust service boundaries, a multi-tenant customer portal, CosmosDB-backed projections on Orleans.
Publishing, live
A third-party SaaS replaced by an in-house system while it was in use: live data migration over Service Bus, hot switching behind feature flags, .NET on Kubernetes in Azure.
Energy trading
Modernising systems around a third-party ETRM: capacity through a message bus, OAuth2 usage reviewed and hardened, the software development lifecycle automated end to end.
Atinian
Twenty years of contract work in regulated, fast-moving environments, offered as a consultancy in its own right. Event-driven, eventually consistent, accountable.
// the principal
The principal
Every engagement is led by the same person. If you're talking to us, you're talking to them.
Thomas Elmore
Founder & Principal Engineer
Senior software engineer for over twenty years — building and leading Agile teams in fast-moving environments across finance and energy trading. Specialism: event-driven, eventually consistent architectures in cloud-hosted environments, including the integration strategies with the existing systems you can't rip out. Currently exploring how agentic-AI productivity can be balanced with rigour, verification and risk management.
// credentials
Regulated environments, in depth
// meet the actual person
One call, no sales motion.
Tell us what you're building or what's breaking. You'll speak to the engineer who'd be on the project — that's how we work.
Talk to the principal· we reply within one business day