Hilary Brennan-Marquez

Infrastructure Consulting

Fix the foundation.
Then add AI.

Everyone is racing to bolt AI onto their engineering stack. Most of it isn't working — not because the AI is bad, but because the infrastructure underneath it is too noisy, too manual, and too fragile to support it.

I help early-stage engineering teams get their infrastructure to a place where AI can actually make a difference: clean release processes, solid monitoring, and the right amount of automation. No more, no less.

Who this is for

Services

Foundation Audit

$12,000
2–3 weeks  ·  Fixed fee  ·  One engagement at a time

An honest assessment of where your infrastructure actually stands — not where you think it stands. I look at your release process, monitoring setup, deployment pipeline, and cloud spend, and tell you what's working, what's quietly broken, and what needs to change before you add more complexity on top.

Most teams come out of this with a clearer picture than they've had in years. The deliverable is a written report you can act on immediately — not a slide deck full of recommendations that go nowhere.

Deliverables
  • Written findings report with prioritized recommendations
  • Assessment of AI readiness — what's blocking it and what to fix first
  • 60-minute readout with your team to walk through findings
  • 30-day follow-up to answer questions as you start executing

Infrastructure Cleanup

From $25,000
4–8 weeks  ·  Fixed fee  ·  Scoped per engagement

Once you know what needs fixing, I can do the work. A Cleanup engagement tackles one well-defined problem: getting your infrastructure into Terraform, migrating your observability stack, untangling your release process, or right-sizing your cloud spend.

Scope is fixed upfront so there are no surprises. I work alongside your existing team rather than around them — the goal is to leave things in better shape and make sure your engineers understand what changed and why.

Recent examples
  • Observability stack migration from Datadog to Vector, Prometheus, and Grafana
  • AWS resource management migrated from manual provisioning to Terraform
  • Single-region to multi-region infrastructure expansion
  • Legacy data warehouse migration to Snowflake with microservices ETL

How it works

  1. Reach out
    Fill out the form below with a quick description of where things stand. I'll get back to you within a couple of days.
  2. Intro call
    A 30-minute conversation to make sure we're a good fit and I understand what you're working with. No pitch, no deck.
  3. Scoping
    For audits, scope is standard. For cleanups, I'll send a short SOW based on what we discussed — fixed fee, defined deliverables, clear timeline.
  4. The work
    I take one engagement at a time and give it my full attention. You'll always know where things stand.