About
A software company that still writes software.
IR4 is a UK engineering consultancy. We are deliberately small, deliberately technical, and we take a limited number of projects at a time — which means the person who scopes your work is the person who builds it, and nothing is handed to a junior once the contract is signed.
The trade-off is a fair question to ask, and we answer it directly: everything we build is designed so that you could continue without us. How that works.
What we are
Engineering, not resale.
A great deal of what is sold as software consultancy is configuration: connecting products built by other people and stopping at the edge of what those products allow. It is a legitimate service, and for many problems it is the right answer.
It stops working at exactly the point that matters — where your business does something genuinely its own. That is the boundary where most suppliers say it cannot be done, and where we start.
We run our own production infrastructure: Kubernetes, CI/CD, PostgreSQL and Redis, hosting our own products. It means the practices we recommend are ones we live with, and that we are not adding margin to a platform somebody else operates.
Company
- Registered name
- IR4 Ltd
- Company number
- 13595661
- Registered in
- England & Wales
- Based
- Merseyside, United Kingdom
We work with clients across the UK, remotely and on site.
How we build
Opinions we will not be talked out of.
Build it right, then make it fast
Correctness first, then clarity, then performance — in that order. Optimising something that does the wrong thing efficiently is the most expensive mistake in software, and it is astonishingly common.
Tests are a design tool, not paperwork
Code written to be testable is better structured before a single test runs. We write them because they make the system easier to change in two years, which is when the value actually shows up.
Security is a default, not a phase
Our background includes PCI-DSS regulated software and systems that were penetration tested annually for years. Secure defaults cost almost nothing at design time and are ruinous to retrofit.
Documentation is part of delivery
A system nobody but us can operate is a liability we have sold you. Written architecture, runbooks and handover are included in the work rather than quoted as an extra.
We say when something is a bad idea
Including when the answer is that you do not need custom software at all, and something off the shelf will do. We would rather lose the work than build the wrong thing.
No lock-in by design
Your licence to what we build you is perpetual, your data is exported whenever you ask, and the infrastructure definitions and documentation are handed over with it. Stopping paying us does not stop your systems working.
Experience
Twenty-five years of other people’s systems.
The work behind IR4 runs from repairing computers in a Merseyside shop, through insurance software under PCI-DSS, to a decade of large-scale commerce engineering at The Hut Group — including technical leadership on a £100M greenfield platform from first commit through to live operation.
That range matters more than any single line of it. Having built systems where an hour of downtime is measurable in revenue changes how you build everything afterwards; having fixed somebody’s broken machine on a shop counter changes how you explain it.
Let’s talk about your systems.
An initial conversation costs nothing and usually clarifies the problem whether or not you work with us.
Start a conversation