Melbourne SRE consulting · Embedded with startups & scale-ups

Built for now.
Ready for what's next.

Aomidori is Japanese for blue-green. It nods to teal principles, to fresh ways of thinking, and to the boring deployment pattern that quietly keeps the world running.

We're a Melbourne-based Site Reliability Engineering practice. We embed with startups and scale-ups across Australia on reliability, observability, cloud cost, and Terraform infrastructure — and leave your team self-sufficient.

See what we do

When founders call us

Something has usually started to break. Pages at 3am with no clear path to stopping them. A cloud bill growing faster than revenue, with no visibility into why. Incidents that feel reactive — the same problems coming back. One engineer who knows how everything works, and might leave next month.

You're past MVP. You're not yet at enterprise scale. You don't need a five-year contract with a big consultancy, and you're not ready to hire a full-time SRE. You need senior judgement on the ground, and a team that can carry the work after we leave.

That's the gap Aomidori fills. We embed with your engineers, do the work alongside them, and hand off cleanly. The deliverable that matters most isn't a doc or a dashboard — it's a team that can do this themselves.

What we do

Four service areas, scoped engagements, and fixed pricing where it makes sense. Each one designed to leave your team self-sufficient.

Reliability Engineering

Incident response, on-call, SLOs, and observability. We get embedded, learn how things actually work, and build a reliability practice your team can run themselves.

What you get

Faster, calmer incident response
On-call your engineers don't dread
SLOs and monitoring that mean something

Cloud Infrastructure

Terraform that won't make your engineers wince. Architecture right-sized for now, with clear paths to scale. Decisions documented so your team can defend them at 3am.

What you get

IaC patterns your team can extend
State management that isn't a source of dread
Architecture decision records, not folklore

Cloud Cost Management

Plain-English analysis of your cloud spend. Visibility for the engineers who can actually act on it. No FinOps platform that costs $2k/month to save $1.5k.

What you get

Spend mapped to features, not just services
Top reduction opportunities, ranked by impact
A cost culture, not a cost policeman

Embedded Partnership

Fractional SRE lead embedded with your team a couple of days a week — working across reliability, infrastructure, and cost as the team needs it, while bringing your engineers up. By month four, your next senior hire inherits a runway, not a mess.

What you get

Senior reliability leadership without a full-time hire
Knowledge transfer in every session
A team that owns the work when we hand off

How we work

Reliability work is mostly cultural work. Here's how we approach every engagement — and what makes us different to a big consultancy or a staffing agency.

Operators, not vendors

We've carried the pager. We've made 3am decisions. Every engagement is led by an engineer who has done your job, in your shoes, in scaling companies — not someone who has read about it.

Honest tradeoffs

We'll tell you if you don't need something — even if we could bill for it. No theatre, no jargon, no FinOps speak. We explain what we're choosing and what we're trading away.

Simplicity as strategy

Easier is better than clever. Safer means faster. We push for simple solutions that don't make us look smart — but that your team can still maintain six months after we leave.

We make your engineers better

We don't just leave you with better tools. We leave you with better engineers — the shared vocab, the directed urgency, and the product thinking of an SRE who has shipped at scale.

Right-sized for your stage

We build for where you are now, with clear paths to scale — not infrastructure for a company you're not yet. Most things that slow teams down aren't building too slowly; they're building the wrong thing.

Empathy, built in

Everyone here has worked as both an IC and a manager. We understand both sides of the engineering relationship — engineers want work they're proud of, leadership needs results. We hold both.

How an engagement looks

Most engagements start with a conversation, not a sales process. The first call is about whether we're the right fit for your problem right now — not closing a deal. If we're not, we'll say so.

From there, a 2-hour discovery session with reliability leadership, then a proposal covering length, collaboration model, and shared goals. Engagements typically run as 2–6 week sprints with regular check-ins. We embed with one or more of your engineers wherever we can — that's not just efficient, it's the point.

Cloud Infrastructure and Cloud Cost engagements are fixed-price — what's quoted is what you pay, no surprise scope creep. Reliability and embedded engagements are scoped against team size and duration.

Who you'll work with

Shaun O'Keefe — founder of Aomidori, SRE consulting in Melbourne

Aomidori was founded by Shaun O'Keefe, who has worked in automation, developer experience, and reliability engineering since the field was still called DevOps. His background spans staff IC, line manager, technical group lead, and CTO at high-growth tech companies.

Shaun's professional identity: humanist, minimalist, secret socialist. The company is a vehicle for living those values out — for clients, for staff, and for the broader engineering community. He believes reliability work is fundamentally cultural work, and cultural work is only done well by people who genuinely care about the humans involved.

Every Aomidori engagement is led by an engineer with the same operating philosophy.

Ready when you are.

Tell us where you are, where you're trying to get to, and what's hurting most. If we're the right fit for the problem, we'll say so. If we're not, we'll point you to who is — and tell you what to watch for in the meantime, no charge.

pager@aomidori.au