Cloud infrastructure and DevOps in Chicago
Plenty of established Chicago companies still run important work on servers in a room or a colocation cage: a decade of cron jobs, a database nobody dares restart, and deploys that happen by someone copying files at night. It works, until the person who knows how retires or the hardware leaves support.
We start by writing down what is actually running, which is always more than anyone thinks. Then we move it in stages to infrastructure defined in code, whether that is a major cloud or self-hosted Kubernetes on rented hardware, with deploys from CI, backups that are restored in a test each month, and monitoring that pages a named person. The destination follows the workload: if something is cheaper and safer where it is, it stays there, documented and monitored.
Chicago's software buyers are mostly not startups selling to other startups. The city's economy rests on trading and derivatives, around CME Group and the proprietary trading firms that grew up beside the exchanges; on freight and logistics, because this is where much of the country's rail and trucking traffic meets; on insurance, from carriers to the brokers and agencies around them; and on manufacturing and distribution across the Midwest. These are established, profitable businesses, and a good deal of their software is older than some of the engineers who maintain it.
So the work is integration and modernisation more often than a blank page. Freight systems speak EDI and carrier APIs that disagree about what happened to a load. Insurers run on policy administration systems nobody wants to replace and everybody wants to build around. Trading firms keep their latency-critical code with in-house specialists, and buy the layer around it: risk and reconciliation reports, operations dashboards, internal tools and data pipelines. The strongest pitch in Chicago is rarely a rewrite. It is a clean, documented system built beside the old one, with work moved across one piece at a time.
Built In puts the average base salary for a software engineer in Chicago at around $133,000, and every employer in the city competes with the trading firms for the same engineers. The result is a familiar backlog: the carrier integration that has to be done properly once, the agency portal everyone complains about, the internal tools the engineering team is too busy to reach. Those are defined pieces of work, which suits an engagement. It starts with a fixed-price two-week piece, and the code belongs to you from the first commit.
We move our working day for Illinois. Four hours of every working day overlap with your morning in Central time, stand-up included, so calls, reviews and decisions happen live with the engineer who writes the code. Everything decided or discovered is written down in your repository and tracker, and runbooks and architecture notes are written as we go, so the system built beside the old one is documented from its first day.
We are the right fit for a defined piece of modernisation, an integration that has to be done properly once, or the internal tools your own engineers are too busy to reach. Senior capacity starts within days, the first piece is a fixed-price two-week engagement, and agencies serving Chicago's insurers can put the work under their own name.
Four ways this arrives.
Resources were created in the console over several years and nobody can say which ones matter. We inventory the account, bring what is live into Terraform, remove what is not, and hand you a repository that describes the whole estate.
It is usually idle capacity, oversized instances, forgotten environments and data transfer nobody priced. We find where the money goes, cut the obvious waste where you already are, and only then ask whether a cheaper provider such as Hetzner suits your steady workloads.
One person knows the steps and every release waits for them. We build a pipeline that tests, builds and deploys on merge, with rollback to the previous image, so shipping on a Friday afternoon is a decision rather than a gamble.
The channel fires all day, so everyone has muted it, so real outages are reported by customers. We alert on what users actually feel, route each alert to a named owner, and delete every alert nobody would act on at 3am.
A K3s cluster on Hetzner that we provisioned and are on call for, deployed through Flux, where only a push to master can produce an image production will run.
Read the write-up →Asked by Chicago teams.
How do you work with teams in Chicago?+
We are in Bengaluru and move our working day for Illinois, so four hours of every working day overlap with your morning in Central time, stand-up included. Calls, reviews and decisions happen in that window. The rest of the work lives in your tools: messages in Slack, code in GitHub, tickets in Linear. The person on every call is the engineer who writes the code, so a question about the system gets answered by the person who built it.
Do you build for Chicago freight and logistics companies?+
Yes. The work is usually the layer that turns messy events into a shipment you can trust: EDI load tenders, status updates and invoices parsed into one event model, carrier tracking APIs reconciled against it, and proof-of-delivery photos from a field app that works offline. Around that sit the operations screens a brokerage floor uses all day, and the pipelines that turn loads and lanes into pricing and margin reports.
How does your rate compare to hiring in Chicago?+
Built In puts the average base salary for a software engineer in Chicago at about $133,000, before benefits and bonus, and you are competing with trading firms for that person. Our published rate is $35/hour, or $5,400 a month for an embedded engineer, with a $5,000 minimum. There is no recruiting time and no employment overhead, and work starts within days. A fixed-price two-week first piece at $2,800 lets you judge us on output.
Can you build alongside our existing systems rather than replacing them?+
Yes, and in Chicago that is most of the work. We read the old system, write down what it actually does, and build the new piece beside it. Work moves across one workflow at a time, with both running until the last piece lands, so the business keeps running without a cut-over weekend. We did exactly this on FM360, moving a pipeline across module by module rather than in one cut-over.
Should we run our own Kubernetes cluster?+
Usually not. Self-hosting starts to pay when your managed bill is mostly things you do not use, your workloads are steady rather than spiky, and someone is willing to own the control plane. We run our own on Hetzner, so we know what that job involves. If nobody on your side wants it, managed is cheaper in total even when the invoice is larger.
Do we need Kubernetes at all?+
Often not. Plenty of products are better served by a managed container service, a platform like Railway, or two virtual machines and a good deploy script. Kubernetes earns its place when you run several services, have steady traffic and have people to look after it. We will recommend the least infrastructure that does the job, and say so when that is less than you expected.
Which clouds do you work with?+
AWS most often, then Google Cloud, Azure and Hetzner. We work in whichever one you are already on, because moving clouds is rarely the cheapest fix for a cost or reliability problem. If we think a move is worth it, we will show you the case using your own bill before anyone migrates anything.
Can you cut our cloud bill without a migration?+
Usually, yes. Most of a bill that has grown unchecked is idle capacity, oversized instances, environments left running and data transfer nobody priced, and all of that is fixed where you already are. We will not promise a percentage before we have read the bill. After the first week we can tell you what is realistic and what it takes to get there.
Who is on call?+
Whoever the engagement says, in writing. While we run your infrastructure it can be us, with hours and response times agreed up front. If you are taking it in-house, the handover includes the runbooks, the alert routing and a rota your team can actually staff. We do not leave behind a pager that only we know how to answer.