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DesignBench

Generated by Opus 4.6 · DurkBench design benchmark

10m 18s start to finish

Everything below this bar is the page the model wrote. DurkBench did not change a word of it, and the company it describes is made up.

AI systems consultancy · Lisbon

We design the systems behind the systems.

Nine engineers building agent architectures, evaluation harnesses, retrieval pipelines, and the operational plumbing that makes AI work in production.

42

systems shipped

6

countries served

100 %

code handed off

What we do

Four things, done exceptionally

01

Agent Architecture

We design multi-agent systems that survive contact with production.

Tool-use graphs, memory hierarchies, routing logic, and failure modes—defined and stress-tested before you write a line of orchestration code.

02

Evaluation Harnesses

Off-the-shelf evals measure the wrong things for your domain.

We build automated scoring, human-in-the-loop protocols, and regression suites so you know exactly when your model degrades.

03

Retrieval Pipelines

RAG is easy to demo and punishing to operate at scale.

Chunking strategies, re-ranking layers, and hybrid search architectures tuned to your corpus, your latency budget, and your accuracy bar.

04

Operational Plumbing

The work between the model and the user is where most teams stall.

Guardrails, observability, cost controls, and deployment automation that let AI systems run without hand-holding.

How we work

Diagnostic to hand-off in 8–14 weeks

  1. 1

    Map

    A two-week diagnostic. We audit your stack, interview your engineers, and document every dependency, bottleneck, and risk surface.

  2. 2

    Design

    We write the architecture: component boundaries, data contracts, failure modes, and a build sequence. Every trade-off made explicit.

  3. 3

    Build

    We pair with your team on the hard parts—the orchestrator, the eval suite, the retrieval core—and hand off clean, documented code.

  4. 4

    Harden

    Load testing, red-teaming, runbook writing. We stay until the system runs without us and your team can extend it alone.

Selected work

Systems we’ve shipped

Client

Meridian Health

Challenge

Clinical-notes search returned irrelevant results 40% of the time, slowing diagnosis workflows across twelve hospitals.

What we built

Rebuilt their retrieval pipeline with a hybrid dense-sparse architecture and a domain-specific re-ranker trained on clinician feedback.

Result

94% precision at p95 latency under 200 ms

Client

Luno Logistics

Challenge

Needed autonomous agents to reroute freight in real time but couldn't trust unverified outputs at scale.

What we built

Designed a three-agent architecture with a verifier loop, confidence scoring, and a human escalation protocol.

Result

6× automated rerouting, exception rate down to 1.2%

Client

Canto Education

Challenge

Their AI tutor hallucinated on 12% of math explanations, eroding trust with teachers and parents.

What we built

Built a domain-grounded evaluation harness with step-level verification and a citation pipeline back to approved curricula.

Result

Hallucination rate fell to 0.3% across 50k sessions

Our team

Nine people, four you should know

MV

Mariana Vidal

Principal, Systems Design

Former distributed-systems lead at Feedzai. Thinks in state machines.

TG

Tomás Garrett

Principal, ML Engineering

Built retrieval infrastructure at Spotify. Unreasonably good at failure analysis.

SA

Sara Andrade

Senior Engineer

Compiler background, now builds evaluation frameworks. Writes the tests nobody else wants to.

JM

João Mendes

Senior Engineer

Operations specialist. Previously ran ML platform reliability at OutSystems.

FAQ

Questions we hear often

Do you build products or just design systems?
Both. Most engagements start with architecture and end with working code your team owns. We don't build end-user products—we build the infrastructure your product runs on.
How large are your engagement teams?
Two to four people from our side, always including a principal. We embed with your engineers rather than working in isolation.
What's a typical engagement length?
Eight to fourteen weeks. The diagnostic takes two, the build takes the rest. We scope tightly and prefer to finish early.
Do you work with early-stage startups?
Yes, if the problem is real and the team is technical. We've worked with Series A companies and multinationals. Budget conversations happen on the first call.
Can you work in our stack?
We're opinionated about architecture, not about tooling. Python, TypeScript, Go—whatever your team maintains, we work in.

Let’s build something that lasts

Tell us what you’re working on. We respond within two business days with an honest assessment of whether we can help.