Candor over comfort
If your plan has a flaw, you will hear it in the first week, not in the post-mortem. We would rather lose the work than deliver something we know will not hold.
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About usA consultancy built by people who got tired of consulting.
Montana Skies started in 2014 with three engineers and a simple rule: the people who sell the work do the work.
Our story
Founded on a complaint, run on a promise.
Our founders met at a large systems integrator, on a project that took fourteen months to deliver something the client could have used in three. The pattern was familiar to anyone who has worked in this industry: senior people win the work, junior people staff it, and the gap gets filled with process.
In 2014 they left to try the opposite. Montana Skies hires only engineers with a decade or more of production experience, keeps teams small enough that everyone can hold the whole system in their head, and refuses work we do not think we are the best available team for. We have turned down more projects than we have taken.
Twelve years later we are twenty-eight people spread across four time zones, still founder-owned, and still running the same rule.
2014 Founded
Milestones
Twelve years, deliberately slow growth.
2014
Three engineers, one client
Founded by three engineers after leaving a national integrator. First engagement: a dispatch system for a regional carrier that is still in production.
2017
First cloud practice
Added a dedicated platform engineering practice after the fourth client in a row asked for help operating what we had built for them.
2019
First office
Moved out of the garage and into a real office. Headcount reached fourteen; we turned down our first acquisition conversation.
2021
Remote-first
Formalized distributed work across four time zones, with quarterly onsite weeks for every active engagement.
2023
Data & AI practice
Stood up a dedicated data engineering group after two years of building pipelines inside other engagements. Shipped our first production LLM system the same year.
2026
Twenty-eight people, 180 projects
Still independent, still founder-owned, still hiring one or two engineers a year rather than twenty.
What we believe
Four principles we will actually argue with you about.
Boring technology
Novelty is a cost you pay every time someone new joins the team. We reach for the proven option unless there is a specific reason not to, and we write that reason down.
Leave them stronger
A successful engagement ends with your team more capable than when we arrived. Dependency is a business model; we have chosen a different one.
Own the outcome
Nobody here says “that was out of scope” when a system fails in production. We fix it first and sort out the commercial conversation afterwards.
Leadership
The people who scope your project are the people who build it.
Every one of our principals carries a laptop into the standup. It is the only way we know to keep the estimates honest.
Managing Principal
Twenty-two years building financial systems. Runs architecture reviews and the commercial conversations clients tend to dread having.
Principal Architect
Leads the modernization practice. Has retired more legacy systems than she cares to count, none of them with a big-bang cutover.
Head of Platform
Owns the cloud and platform practice. Believes an on-call rotation is a design document you can read at 3am.
Director of Data & AI
Built data platforms in healthcare and energy before joining in 2022. Insists every model ships with an evaluation harness.
Director of Delivery
Keeps engagements honest about scope and schedule. The person who tells you two weeks early that a date is at risk.
Head of Design
Leads product discovery and interface design. Treats accessibility as an acceptance criterion, never a later phase.
Careers
We hire one or two engineers a year. It might be you.
We do not grow to fill a sales pipeline, which means openings are rare and the bar is high: ten-plus years of production experience, a track record of owning systems rather than tickets, and the temperament to tell a client something they do not want to hear.
In return: no bench, no utilization targets, no travel you did not agree to, profit sharing from your first year, and four weeks of paid time off that people here genuinely take.
- Fully remote
- Salary bands published internally and reviewed annually
- One paid week a year for open-source or learning work
- Quarterly onsite weeks, travel covered
Let’s build something
Tell us about the system that’s holding you back.
Every engagement starts with a free 45-minute working session. No pitch deck — we dig into your architecture, your roadmap, and your constraints, then tell you honestly whether we’re the right team for the job.