About us
A small team of senior platform/software engineers and architects
Dais Digital exists because too many platform programmes are sold by people who will never operate the result. We build what we recommend, and we stay to run it when that helps.
Our mission
To make modern cloud platforms genuinely ownable by the teams that depend on them — engineered to a standard that survives audits, incidents, and staff turnover alike.
Our values
Four commitments that shape how we work, and that we expect to be held to.
Evidence over opinion
Recommendations come with the measurements behind them. If we cannot show why, we have not finished thinking.
Candour, even when inconvenient
We will tell you when a project is not worth doing, or when you do not need us for it.
Secure and compliant by default
Security, governance, and auditability are designed in from the first commit, not retrofitted before an audit.
Independence you can verify
Open standards and infrastructure as code keep your options open — including the option to move on from us.
Our experience
Each era of our work informs the next. The tools change; the discipline does not.
Foundations
Enterprise infrastructure and operations
Years spent running large on-premises and hybrid estates taught us what actually breaks at 3am — and why most outages are design decisions made much earlier.
Cloud era
Azure architecture and migration at scale
Designing landing zones, migrating regulated workloads, and building the governance to keep those estates coherent as they grew.
Platform era
Kubernetes, GitOps, and developer platforms
Turning infrastructure into a product with golden paths, self-service, and delivery pipelines measured in minutes rather than days.
Now
AI enablement and agentic systems
Applying the same platform discipline to AI workloads: evaluated, observable, governed, and safe to operate.
Our approach
How we think about the two areas clients most often ask us to lead.
Platform engineering
- Treat the platform as a product with real users and a real roadmap
- Make the secure, observable, well-governed path the path of least resistance
- Automate the repetitive so scarce engineering attention goes to the novel
- Document and hand over deliberately — a platform nobody understands is a liability
AI enablement
- Start from the operational question, not from the model
- Evaluate continuously: retrieval quality and task success, not vibes
- Scope permissions tightly and keep a human in the loop where consequences are irreversible
- Log prompts, responses, and tool calls so behaviour can be audited after the fact
The team
Dais Digital is led by its two co-founders, who deliver the work alongside you.
Richard Shawley
Co-founder & Director
Software and platform engineer turned solution architect, with 19 years across the public and private sector.
Richard Lang
Co-founder & Director
Software, platform and DevOps engineer with over 20 years of hands-on delivery experience.
Our associate network
Staying small keeps our standards high, but larger programmes need more capacity than two directors can provide. So we maintain a network of associates — senior engineers and architects we already know and trust — who we can bring in for bigger builds and specialist work.
Associates work inside our engineering practices and under our accountability, so the standard of the work does not change with the size of the team. If you are a senior engineer or architect, you can apply to join the network.
Think we might be a fit?
We're happy to spend half an hour on your problem before either of us commits to anything.