Three engineers working at lit monitors in a dim open-plan studio at night, city lights through the windows

Senior engineers who work alongside your team and ship the whole system.

Playground Labs is an engineering studio. We build software applications and backend infrastructure for ambitious businesses, alongside your team or from scratch.

Engineeringalongside you.

Our position

Most software projects fail in the handoff between the people who decide and the people who build. We work inside that gap: senior engineers who sit with your team from the first conversation to production, whether that means working inside your codebase or building the system from scratch.

Three sandboxes. One team.

People reviewing documents at a table in a glass-walled room
01 · Embedded

Forward Deployed Engineering

Senior engineers embedded directly in your team — building and shipping from inside your codebase, not handing off specs from a deck.

  • Embedded senior engineers
  • On-site & in-repo delivery
  • Discovery & rapid prototyping
  • Domain knowledge transfer
A bank of monitors filled with code and charts along a window wall at dusk
02 · Applications

Software Applications

Custom web and mobile applications built with modern frameworks, designed to scale with your business.

  • Full-stack development
  • SaaS products
  • API design & integration
  • Custom web & mobile apps
A long data center corridor lined with server racks
03 · Infrastructure

Backend Systems & Infrastructure

Robust, scalable backend architecture that keeps your systems running reliably under any load.

  • Cloud architecture
  • DevOps & CI/CD pipelines
  • Database design
  • Scalability engineering

Track record

Measured in what shipped.

projects shipped for ambitious businesses
50+
technologies running in production
30+
response time on every inquiry
<24h

How we engage

From first commit to handoff.

Senior engineering attention from start to finish, from the same engineers who embed with your team on day one.

  1. Two developers at their monitors, one standing to look over the other's shoulder at the code
    01

    Embed

    We join your team and learn your domain, your constraints and your tradeoffs before we write a line of code.

  2. A hand with a stylus tracing a flowchart on a laptop screen, more diagrams on the screens beside it
    02

    Design

    Architecture decided in the open, with the tradeoffs written down. Every choice ties back to what the business needs to ship.

  3. A presenter in glasses gesturing at a wall display of analytics charts, tablet in hand
    03

    Ship

    Production-ready systems, not prototypes. Every release ships with tests, observability and the documentation a future engineer needs.

  4. An engineer with a bag over one shoulder walking out of a bright office while the team keeps working at their desks
    04

    Hand off

    We hand off code that doesn't rot, a team that can run it and the dashboards that prove it — then step back.

Selected work.

Three engagements across our three sandboxes: forward-deployed engineering, software applications and backend infrastructure.

Trade Algo

3x improvement in trade execution speed, 99.99% uptime.

Built a high-frequency trading dashboard processing 50k+ events per second with sub-100ms latency.

Next.js / WebSockets / Redis / PostgreSQL / AWS

McDonald's

60% reduction in infrastructure costs, 40ms average response time globally.

Designed and deployed a multi-region Kubernetes infrastructure handling 10M+ daily requests across 4 continents.

Kubernetes / Terraform / CloudFlare / PostgreSQL / Go

Big 4 Audit Firm

Reduced document review time from 4 hours to 12 minutes per case.

Embedded with the client's team to build a pipeline that extracts, classifies, and summarizes legal documents with 97% accuracy.

Python / OpenAI / LangChain / FastAPI / S3

Stack

Next.jsGoPythonPostgreSQLWebSocketsNext.jsGoPythonPostgreSQLWebSockets
KubernetesTerraformAWSRedisOpenAIKubernetesTerraformAWSRedisOpenAI