Systems Reliability Consulting

Stop the incidents.
Ship with confidence.

Your team is fighting fires instead of building, and stakeholders want answers you don't have yet. We diagnose what's breaking, fix it at the root, and build the engineering practices your team needs to stop reacting and start growing.

Book a Free Call

Free. No obligation. We figure out if it's a fit first.

The Problem

Engineering leaders are bleeding.
Most consultants hand them a bandage.

You are in the middle of a production incident, your best engineers are asleep, and the reputational damage is being charged by the minute. You have to tell that burnt out engineer they need to miss their kid's hockey game to stay and put this fire out.

You've seen the monitoring dashboards showing no errors while users are experiencing failures. In the aftermath, the assessment is always the same. Error logs were missing. Failure modes were never specified. Nobody had written a requirement for how the system should behave when things go wrong. When it's over, you still have to walk into that stakeholder meeting and explain it.

Most teams have a prioritization problem, not a technical problem. That distinction is everything. It is also what most people miss, especially as teams adopt agentic coding tools where the velocity of output accelerates faster than the reliability of the system underneath it.

  • The same incident has happened more than once
  • Your monitoring looks healthy but customers report issues
  • You have a backlog of known issues that never get prioritized
  • New engineers are afraid to touch certain parts of the codebase
  • Your release process depends on one person who knows how it works

This is what an unreliable system looks like from the inside.

How It Works

The process of becoming more reliable.

01
Diagnose
I walk in, ask the hard questions others skip, and look where others will not. A full assessment of your engineering systems, process, culture, and team.
02
Reveal
We put a number on it. Unreliability has a real cost in lost engineering time, incident response, and delayed product work. You will see exactly what the current situation is costing you.
03
Identify
Together, we surface the root causes beneath the symptoms. Not just what broke, but why it keeps breaking.
04
Fix
Whether that is an automation framework, a release process, or testing infrastructure, the fix gets built. The bleeding stops.
05
Target
We define what reliable looks like for your system and start measuring it. Set the next target, so your team knows exactly what good looks like going forward.
Case Studies

From damage control to building with confidence.

ChargeLab
Building a quality engineering function from scratch at a Series A EV charging platform
ChargeLab builds a hardware-agnostic SaaS platform for managing EV charging infrastructure across North America. Scaling fast at Series A, the company had outgrown its early engineering practices. Quality ownership was informal, testing was manual, and production incidents were consuming capacity that should have been going toward the product. I built the quality engineering function from the ground up: automated test frameworks, CI/CD pipelines with quality gates and checklists, and developer-owned testing practices across the team.
95%
Reduction in production incidents over 12 months.
Cleanlist
Automating a manual data mapping process that was failing to scale with client volume
Cleanlist is Canada's largest provider of customer data solutions. Every client engagement required mapping incoming data from whatever format it arrived in to Cleanlist's internal schema. This process was performed entirely by hand on every file from every client. The manual effort was slow, inconsistent, and failing to keep pace with growing client volume. I built an automated mapping pipeline in that handled clear cases automatically and surfaced ambiguous mappings for human review. The result was reduction in manual effort and a more reliable pipeline.
80%
Reduction in manual labour effort, with 85% mapping accuracy on automated cases.
Trudell Medical International
Quality engineering assessment for a medical device manufacturer entering software-controlled products
Trudell Medical International designs and manufactures respiratory health devices distributed to patients in over 100 countries. Expanding into software-controlled mechatronic devices, the company faced quality engineering challenges with direct regulatory and patient safety implications. I conducted a complete assessment across all three disciplines, identifying the gaps between current practices and regulatory compliance, then built automated testing infrastructure and delivered a formal defect management roadmap to close them.
3
Engineering disciplines assessed. One roadmap. A clear path to regulatory compliance.
Self-Assessment

Find out what unreliable software is costing you.

Reliability AssessmentAnswer a few questions. See the cost. Start the conversation.
Active
Every time your system has an incident, you're not just fixing code. You're defending your credibility. Let's find out what that's actually costing you. How do you relate to your software systems?
Your Unreliability Cost Estimate
Updates as you answer questions
Incident cost—
Failed release cost—
Unplanned work cost—
Turnover / credibility cost—
Estimated Annual Total—
Estimates are based on your answers and the ability of the AI tooling to extract the data.
A full assessment goes deeper. Let's fix this →
About

Engineering Leadership

I have spent my career assessing systems and building reliable solutions. Whether it was medical devices, EV charging infrastructure, or rehabilitation robotics, I go deep, think across disciplines, and do not leave until it works.

The quality of the system determines whether your efforts go towards growing the system, or keeping it from dying.

I help you build the engineering team your business can bet on.

Medical DevicesEV InfrastructureEmbedded SystemsCloud ArchitectureQuality EngineeringRehabilitation Robotics
Tyler Desplenter
Tyler Desplenter, PhD
PhD, Robotics & Control Systems  
Systems Thinking Understand the parts, and the whole. Process, culture, tooling, and team structure are all in scope. The technical problem is rarely the only problem.
Scientific Foundations Diagnose from evidence, not just instinct. Use methodologies that have been tested, challenged, and validated. Test rigorously and iterate.
Technical Leadership Familiar with the pressure, not just the theory. Build teams, manage incidents, and understand the code. The problems engineering leaders bring are recognized, not described.
Common Questions

Questions worth asking before you book a call.

The first step is a free discovery call, no commitment, just a conversation to understand your situation. If it makes sense to go further, the next step is the Engineering Diagnostic: a structured 90-minute session with a full findings report delivered within five business days. From there, you choose the engagement that fits: a focused Quality Engineering Assessment, a retained programme, or something in between. The Diagnostic tells you which one is right.

Probably, eventually. But the team is the system. When the same people who built the current patterns are also responsible for diagnosing and changing them, there is a structural conflict. An outside perspective sees what insiders have stopped noticing. What you get is a straight read from someone with no reason to hide the truth.

Every engagement starts with the Engineering Diagnostic, a 90-minute session with a full findings report delivered within five business days. That gives you a complete picture before committing to anything further. From there, engagements range from a focused two-to-three week Quality Engineering Assessment to an ongoing retained programme. The diagnostic tells you which one fits.

Probably closer than you think. Unreliable systems look very different on the surface: EV charging software, medical devices, cloud platforms. But the root causes are almost always the same: failure modes never defined upfront, ownership gaps between teams, reactive patching instead of deliberate design. The domain changes. The patterns do not.

It depends on the engagement, but the principle is consistent: you always know what is happening and why. The Engineering Diagnostic is a focused session followed by a written report within five business days. Deeper engagements involve interviews, technical reviews, and direct work with your team. At every stage, you leave knowing more than when you arrived.

Busy usually means the system is already in the state that makes this work most valuable. The instinct to wait until things calm down is reasonable, but unreliable systems do not calm down on their own, they compound. The question is whether the cost of waiting is lower than the cost of starting. The assessment tool above can help you put a number on that.

That is exactly what the cost assessment on this page is designed to answer. If the number it generates is larger than the cost of an engagement, the math is straightforward. If it is not, I will tell you that. Clients should be able to see a clear return.

Articles

Hard truths for engineering leaders.

June 30, 2026 · 5 min read
You Trained Your Engineers To Stay Silent
“So, does anyone have anything they want to share with the team?” The room stays silent. You let it sit long enough that people start to squirm, but no one jumps in.
Read article →
June 23, 2026 · 5 min read
The Hidden Cost of Feature Flags
Your team is about to roll out the new AI-powered search feature the board has been pushing for. They put it behind a feature flag and selected a subset of users to take it live in production.
Read article →
June 16, 2026 · 5 min read
Don't Let AI Shutdowns Turn Your Business Into A Fable
You get a call from an engineer in the early morning because the production system is down. The services that relied on Claude Fable 5 are not functioning.
Read article →
View all articles →
See what unreliability is costing you →

Ready to stop the bleeding?

If you are tired of unreliable systems,
start the conversation.

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tyler@reliably.ca|LinkedIn