ABOUT
23 years of staying close enough to the work to know what's actually possible.
We are a small, elite technical consultancy. We work across infrastructure, platform engineering, distributed systems, and AI. Wherever the hard problems live at the intersection of technology and the business that depends on it. Startup velocity, hyperscaler depth, enterprise fluency.
Sometimes that means building the platform your engineering teams need to actually ship. Sometimes it means finding the leverage points that change the trajectory when incremental fixes have stopped working. Sometimes it means closing the gap between a proof of concept and production AI that runs reliably under real conditions. The shape of the engagement follows the problem.
We come in, find the highest leverage points, build what needs building, grow your team's capability to own it, and leave. Every engagement is designed to make you more capable. Not more dependent on us.
We'll tell you when you're wrong. We'll push back on decisions we think will hurt you. We'll admit when we're wrong too, and change course. We'll roll up our sleeves and do the work alongside your team. What we won't do is extend an engagement past where we're actually useful, or tell you what you want to hear when you need to hear something else.
If you want someone to validate what you've already decided, we're probably not your people. If you want someone who will treat your outcomes like their own, let's talk.
I'm Patrick McClory, and I've been doing this for 23 years. Not the same thing for 23 years. The same commitment for 23 years. To staying close enough to the work that I always know what's actually possible. To telling people what they need to hear instead of what keeps the contract comfortable. To building things that last after I leave.
5+
patents
infrastructure · AI · telemetry · security
4
companies built
from zero to production scale
70+
cities
across 6 continents
// PATENTS
System and method for management of deployed services and applications
Artificial intelligence based video game state detection
System and method for integration, testing, deployment, orchestration, and management of applications
System and method for rapid and asynchronous multitenant telemetry collection and storage
System and method for real-time asynchronous multitenant gateway security
// WHAT I'VE BUILT
Four companies. Two successful exits. One acquihire. One that didn't survive 2020. I learned something real from each of them.
DualSpark ran for about 17 months. We founded it on a simple thesis: enterprises needed someone who could close the gap between what cloud made possible and what their engineering teams could actually execute. We grew to 30+ clients and a team of around 30 before Datapipe acquired us. What DualSpark taught me, as clearly as anything in my career, is that ending an engagement because the client no longer needs you is the most successful outcome there is. We built that into every engagement from day one.
Datapipe was where that thesis got tested at scale. I started with zero staff, zero platform, and zero roadmap and built their Kubernetes platform from the ground up. Grew the team to dozens of engineers, made the architecture calls, carried them through board approvals and funding conversations as SVP of Platform Engineering, and delivered something customers actually relied on. Something that outlasted the company itself. That is not just an architecture story. It is building the team, owning the roadmap, making the case in the boardroom, and delivering. That combination is the kind of thing you cannot learn from a whitepaper.
One engagement in the years since involved building a peer-to-peer competitive platform for esports. Two players, a dollar each on a match, winner takes it. The technical problem was settling outcomes in under 5 seconds globally with participants who had every incentive to dispute the result. AI adjudication, crowdsourced consensus, lightweight client-side telemetry. One patent came out of that work specifically. Four others came out of the Datapipe years, spanning infrastructure automation, telemetry systems, and gateway security. The thread running through all of them is the same: find the problem nobody has solved cleanly, and build something that actually works.
Consulting engagements at the strategic, architectural, and engineering levels across media, retail, SaaS, social, non-profit, education, entertainment, financial services, hosting, and legal. With companies from early-stage to Fortune 50, across six continents. A career built around never getting so far from the technology that I lose track of what is actually possible.
// THIS IS JUST HOW I WORK
A story that has nothing to do with infrastructure and everything to do with how I actually operate.
A few years ago I proposed to my wife at a mountainside bar in Baja California, overlooking the Pacific. She was on her 40th birthday trip with her friends. Weeks of planning, three days of lying about what I was doing, and a cover drive past a datacenter in San Diego to turn off my location for the rest.
What I had not fully accounted for: half a dozen women who had spent weeks organizing a weekend of complete disconnection and had zero interest in some guy showing up to complicate it. I made the case to each of them in the lead-up. Some held out until the day of.
I said what needed to be said, treated the table right, and left the weekend better than I found it. Their words. Even the holdouts came around. Nobody watching knew how much had to go right behind the scenes to make it look that smooth.
// WHAT PEOPLE SAY
He is an Architect's architect; he's passionate about technology, leads by example, and his work is founded on principled and pragmatic reasoning and experience. It's not often that you meet, let alone get to work with, someone like Patrick.
Chris Scragg
Cloud & Infrastructure Architect
Datapipe
Patrick is a game changing force. His brilliance and ability to inspire those around him and lead them to truly amazing things is second to none. Beyond the business side of things, Patrick is a technical giant.
Scott Vidmar
Engineer and SRE Leader
direct report
Patrick has a great combination of vision and ability to execute. We often have different angles of view on the same topics that provides us each with new perspectives. I'd love to find a way to collaborate on more with Patrick.
David Winter
ex-AWS · ex-Google Cloud ISV
Orion Innovation
Three people, three different vantage points, same observation: vision and execution in the same person, even when the situation resists it. That combination doesn't come from talent. It comes from a set of beliefs about how good work actually gets done.
// WHAT WE BELIEVE
Platform serves app. App serves customer.
Every technical decision should be traceable back to that chain. When it isn't, when we're doing technology for its own sake, I'll say so.
Complexity is always a choice.
Systems don't get complicated on their own. People let them. Sometimes complexity is the right call. It should be a deliberate one, not something that accumulates because nobody wanted to make a decision.
People, process, technology. In that order.
The best technology in the world will fail inside the wrong process. The right process will fail with the wrong people. Fix them in order or you are just buying expensive problems.
Good infrastructure is invisible.
When it works, nobody notices. When it breaks, everything stops. My job is to build the kind that nobody notices.
Be the person who makes the hard call.
Most of the time the right answer is uncomfortable for somebody in the room, including you. The job is not to find the answer that nobody minds. It is to find the right one and be willing to defend it on the way to the room agreeing. Comfort comes after.
The best engagement ends with you not needing me.
The most successful outcome you can deliver is a client who can hold their own (and then some) after you're gone. Not dependent, not stuck, not calling you back in six months for the same problem. Better. Every engagement should be building toward that from day one.
If any of this sounds like what you've been looking for,
Let's talk