I’m Neil. I’m based in Bedford and I work with companies around the Route 128 corridor on infrastructure that’s gotten expensive, fragile, hard to operate, or all three at once.

Cloud platforms, Linux systems, networks, automation, observability, migrations, and the organizational mess that tends to accumulate around them. I’m a senior engineer, comfortable from the kernel and the network up through the architecture diagram, and I’ll implement the fix rather than just hand you a recommendation and leave.

Bedford’s mix of software, biotech, defense work, robotics, and advanced manufacturing produces unusually interesting infrastructure problems. That’s most of why I’m here.

Why hire me for this

Not a rotating support queue. I stay directly involved from scoping through implementation — you don’t get handed off to a mystery junior team, and accountability stays in one place.

I’m useful for the ugly cross-domain problems that don’t fit neatly inside one vendor’s box, the ones where the network, the cloud account, the deploy pipeline, and the one undocumented server are all part of the same story.

And I’m local. When the problem involves hardware, a lab, a plant floor, or some other piece of physical reality, I can be on-site instead of asking you to describe the blinking light over a video call.

Problems I tend to get called about

You’ll probably recognize at least one of these:

  • The AWS bill grew faster than the product did.
  • Production deploys still route through the one person who remembers how it works.
  • IT and OT technically share a network, and nobody wants to say that out loud.
  • The factory network was never designed for the number of things now plugged into it.
  • Recovery from an outage is a manual process that lives mostly in someone’s head.
  • A migration stalled halfway, and now you’re running two of everything.
  • The audit is in six weeks and half the evidence is currently “ask Dave.”

If none of those land, the general shape is: infrastructure that’s grown past what it was designed for, and now costs too much, breaks in ways nobody can predict, or can only be operated by one increasingly nervous person.

Where I tend to work

A handful of environments where I have a real, differentiated story rather than a generic one:

  • Software & technology — scaling systems, cloud spend that outran its usefulness, and deploy pipelines that quietly became load-bearing rituals.
  • Biotech & life sciences — lab and research infrastructure, data handling and retention, and environments that fall under regulatory scrutiny. I build infrastructure and technical controls supporting HIPAA-regulated and 21 CFR Part 11 environments; the compliance itself is an organizational effort, but the technical half is where I live.
  • Advanced manufacturing & industrial (IT/OT) — plant-floor networks, segmentation, and the machines nobody wants to touch during a production run.
  • Defense-adjacent & regulated infrastructure — environments where both the controls and the paperwork have to hold up under inspection.

Other organizations are welcome too; I just don’t pretend to have a specialized story for every possible vertical.

What better looks like

I’m careful about promising numbers I can’t own. Cost savings depend on your specific waste, uptime depends on your systems and your requirements, and audits are decided by far more than infrastructure. Here’s what I can actually influence and defend:

Spend money deliberately. Find the cloud waste, duplicate tooling, oversized infrastructure, and vendor decisions that aren’t buying enough value to justify themselves.

Remove the scary parts. Identify the single points of failure, undocumented systems, manual recovery steps, and infrastructure only one person understands, then fix them.

Make change boring. Automate deployment, configuration, testing, and observability so that ordinary changes stop turning into events.

Get ready for scrutiny. Build the infrastructure and evidence collection that support your security and compliance obligations, without pretending infrastructure alone makes an organization compliant.

Leave things understandable. Documentation, automation, and a real handoff, so you can operate what I built. You shouldn’t need to keep hiring me just to understand your own systems.

What working together looks like

We start with a conversation about what’s broken, what’s working, and what keeps you up at night. Thirty minutes is usually enough to tell whether I’m the right person for the problem.

If it makes sense to keep going, the next step is a bounded assessment rather than an open-ended audit. From there we work through the findings in order of impact, and I implement the fixes where implementation is what’s actually needed.

No waterfall project plans, no enterprise theater. Working systems and changes you can see.

Bedford Business Tech Health Check — starting at $1,500

A deliberately bounded way to start.

For $1,500, we do a focused review of one infrastructure problem, system, or environment. You pick the thing that’s bothering you most; I don’t try to boil the ocean for that price.

You get:

  • a defined review of that one problem or environment,
  • a short written assessment,
  • the three to five things I’d fix first, in priority order,
  • a working session to go through them together,
  • and, if the problem warrants it, a clear picture of what a larger architecture, migration, compliance, or implementation engagement should actually contain.

If the problem turns out to need deeper work, you’ll know what the next engagement is and roughly what it’s for before you spend more money on it. Think of it as a paid first look, not several days of unlimited consulting.

Schedule a Consultation → Email Me Instead →

Running a small office or a home network rather than a company-wide infrastructure problem? I also do local IT support and home networking in Bedford.

Serving software, biotech, industrial, and regulated organizations around Bedford, MA and the Route 128 corridor.