About Helioforge

We're a team of platform engineers, architects, and operators who've built and scaled cloud systems at some of the world's largest and most demanding organizations.

Our story

Helioforge was founded because we kept seeing the same pattern: organizations with serious cloud investments, smart engineers, and real business goals—but fragmented operations that slowed everything down. Infrastructure decisions were made in isolation. Teams owned siloed pieces instead of cohesive platforms. Cost spiraled. Delivery felt friction-filled.

We realized that the problem wasn't technical complexity. It was organizational clarity. Companies needed platforms—not just infrastructure, but complete operating systems for their cloud journey. Platforms with clear ownership, intentional governance, and the architectural discipline to scale.

Helioforge exists to help organizations design and build those platforms. We're not here to hand you a solution. We're here to work with you, teach you, and hand off full operational ownership when we leave. Your team should understand and maintain what we build.

How we work

Practical over perfect

We design for your reality, not an idealized future. The best architecture is one your team can maintain.

Ownership over handoff

You own what we build from day one. Knowledge transfer and capability building are not afterthoughts—they're the core of what we do.

Clarity over cleverness

We explain decisions, document trade-offs, and avoid clever code. Boring infrastructure scales longer than impressive infrastructure.

Collaboration over directives

We pair with your team, learn your constraints, and build consensus around decisions. We work with you, not for you.

Outcomes over features

We measure success by what changes for your business: faster delivery, fewer incidents, lower costs, clearer ownership. Not by line of code shipped.

Long-term thinking

We design for the team you'll have in two years, not just today. Maintainability and extensibility matter as much as velocity.

Our team

A distributed team of experienced platform engineers, cloud architects, and operators with decades of collective experience.

Maya Ellison

Founder & Principal Platform Architect

Maya spent 15 years building infrastructure at scale, including 8 years as a founding engineer at a major cloud platform where she led the team that designed multi-account strategies for enterprises. She founded Helioforge to help other organizations build platforms with the care and precision she learned from those experiences.

Grant Holloway

Director of Cloud Foundations

Grant has architected landing zones and cloud governance frameworks for 40+ enterprises across AWS, Azure, and GCP. His background in financial services instilled in him a deep appreciation for compliance and cost discipline. He brings practical experience and a no-nonsense approach to cloud strategy.

Priya Nanduri

Head of Reliability Engineering

Priya spent 12 years in operations and site reliability roles at high-growth companies where she learned that observability and clear ownership prevent 80% of incidents. She's passionate about building SLO frameworks and incident response cultures that teams trust.

Owen Carlisle

Platform Security Lead

Owen brings 13 years of security architecture and compliance experience from roles in healthcare and financial services. He specializes in designing platforms that make secure choices easy and insecure ones hard—security through architecture, not friction.

Elise Moreno

Director of Developer Experience

Elise spent 10 years building developer platforms at scale. She believes great platforms disappear into the background—teams don't think about infrastructure, they just ship. She drives the design of self-service tools and abstractions that work.

Marcus Bell

Cloud Economics Strategist

Marcus spent 9 years managing cloud costs and financial operations across hundreds of millions of dollars in spend. He understands the hidden costs of ad-hoc cloud adoption and excels at designing chargeback models and optimization strategies that actually stick.

Hannah Wu

Kubernetes Practice Lead

Hannah is a Kubernetes expert with 8 years in platform engineering and container operations. She's built and operated clusters for startups and enterprises, and specializes in helping teams adopt Kubernetes without the complexity overwhelm.

Julian Mercer

Client Delivery Director

Julian leads all of our engagements, ensuring that every client relationship is strategic, transparent, and results-driven. His background in engineering and project delivery means he speaks your language and makes sure knowledge transfers and handoffs are intentional.

Want to work with us?

Let's discuss your platform strategy and how Helioforge can help.

Get in Touch