Two decades of architecture across data, AI, identity, and product — for regulated institutions, national enterprises, and early-stage startups. Protopium is principal-led, so the architects behind that record are the people who do your work.
Not a pitch deck's worth of adjectives — a record of systems that went to production and stayed there.
At most firms, the person who scopes your engagement hands it to whoever is on the bench. Protopium is deliberately built the other way around: every engagement is led by a principal architect who has carried this class of problem to production before — through acquisitions, carve-outs, compliance reviews, and the kind of scale that breaks a design that was only ever a diagram.
That means no ramp-up tax, no telephone game between strategy and delivery, and no junior engineer learning your domain on your budget.
What that buys you. Architecture at the Senior Principal level — the tier that owns multi-product ecosystems, identity across an entire portfolio, and the scaling decisions that are expensive to get wrong — pointed directly at your problem, from the first conversation to production.
Architecture is easy on a whiteboard. These are the situations that tell you whether someone has actually done it.
Corporate events are where architecture debt comes due — all at once, on someone else's timeline.
Single sign-on is where security, user experience, and a decade of acquisitions all collide.
Some of the best work is inherited. We take over systems that are late, slow, or stalled.
Client names are withheld by default. The numbers are not.
eCommerce platform, towing supply distributor. Rebuilt how the catalog resolved taxonomy against production data, turning an unusable search page into the fastest part of the site.
Subrogation pipeline, health insurer. Moved a long-running extract onto a properly staged ETL design and cut its run time by better than 90%.
Vendor bulletins, national hardware retailer. Replaced a 40-step paper process with a 3-step digital workflow, collapsing a two-week minimum turnaround into a quarter of an hour.
Central identity, assessment provider. Led the creation of a single point of authentication for a large ecosystem of applications, then helped each product team integrate against it.
Application security. Contributed to the architecture and integration work behind a $330 million divestiture, including Salesforce authentication integration and cloud cost modeling for a new product.
Capability building. Mentored 15 engineers, trained 8 into architects, established engineering guilds, and defined the career progression path they advanced along.
Regulated data, legacy estates, vendor networks, seasonal load, and audit trails. Domain context is most of the job, and most of what a generalist underestimates.
Long enough to have migrated off most of it, and to know which new thing is worth your risk budget.
Plenty of consultancies are structurally motivated to make themselves necessary. We'd rather make ourselves unnecessary and be invited back for the next hard thing. That's why a transfer of capability is part of every engagement, not an upsell at the end of it.
We've led teams of four to eight engineers alongside client developers, stood up engineering guilds, written the career ladders people advanced along, and brought architecture in as a first-class stakeholder at companies that had never treated it as one. No jargon, no lock-in, and documentation you still understand after we've gone.
Tell us where you are and where you want to be. If we've solved it before, we'll say so — and if we haven't, we'll tell you that too.
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