About us
The engineering team you bring on instead of hiring.
Two senior engineers from Boston, 14 years of combined experience building for venture-backed startups, plus a network we scale on demand. You get the engineering of a team without the cost, risk, and lead time of a hire.
> 01
Where we come from
Automata is Marc and Ralph Ghannam, two senior engineers from Boston with 14 years of combined experience building for founders.
Ralph was a founding engineer at TireTutor and helped grow it into a major player in the automotive space. Marc led engineering at a Series A blockchain company, then ran a consulting practice advising teams on technical delivery and go-to-market. We learned to ship under real pressure, where slow means dead.
> 02
The problem we kept seeing
Founder after founder hit the same wall: they needed software built, so the default plan was to go hire an engineer. Then the reality set in. A senior engineer costs $150k+ all-in, takes months to find, wants equity, and if the fit is wrong you've lost a year and a chunk of your runway.
And that's for one person, with one skill set. The thing they actually needed was for the product to get built, well, fast, by people who'd done it before.
> 03
What we do instead
We're the team companies bring on instead of hiring. Senior from day one, no ramp, no equity, no headcount on your books. When a project needs more hands, we pull from a vetted network of engineers and scale to fit.
If you decide you do want someone in-house, we'll even help you find the right person. And when you're ready for demand, we run the growth and marketing layer too. But the engineering comes first. That's the company.
A new hire is a year-long bet on one person. We're the team you bring on instead.
How we work
The rules we don't break.
> rule 01
The person you call writes the code
No account managers translating your needs to a team you never meet. The founder on your kickoff call is the one shipping your project.
> rule 02
Demos, not decks
Weekly live demos of real working software. If a week passes and there is nothing to click, something went wrong and we will say so.
> rule 03
You own everything
Your code, your accounts, your content, your data. If we ever part ways, everything keeps working and everything stays yours.
> rule 04
We sweat the boring parts
Monitoring, backups, integrations, load times. The unglamorous engineering that decides whether systems hold up after launch.
Leadership
Senior engineers lead every engagement.
Marc Ghannam
Co-Founder & Engineer
Senior full-stack engineer. Led engineering at a Series A blockchain company and ran a consulting practice advising teams on technical delivery and go-to-market.
> previously: eng lead, Series A blockchain co
Ralph Ghannam
Co-Founder & Engineer
Senior full-stack engineer with a track record of building at scale. Founding engineer at TireTutor, an MIT-born startup in the automotive space, where he brought technical vision and hands-on execution from day one.
> previously: founding engineer, TireTutor
> the network
Behind the founders sits a vetted network of senior engineers spanning every specialty a build needs: full-stack, front-end, back-end, DevOps, UI design, mobile, and AI. We pull in the right people as projects demand, so both capacity and skills scale to fit any build without you ever managing headcount. Every one of them has shipped with us before. None learn on your dime, and none touch your project without a founder reviewing the work.
Don't take our word for it
Ask a client who will pick up the phone.
The strongest reference is not a logo wall or a five-star widget. It is a business owner telling you what we were like after the contract was signed.
Tell us your industry and what you're weighing, and we will connect you directly with an Automata client who has agreed to vouch for us. Real client, real conversation, no script.
> reference request
We will match you with a client in a business like yours and make the intro within one business day.
Request a referralBook a call firstor email hello@meetautomata.com
As mentioned in
Ready when you are
Book a call before you post the job.
Thirty minutes, no pitch deck. Tell us what you're building and we'll show you what a senior team delivers for less than one salary. If hiring in-house is genuinely the better move, we'll tell you that too.