Revenant Systems is a founder-led UK software consultancy for startups, growing companies, and established SMEs whose systems have become business-critical. Ian Compton leads the engineering across bespoke software, production LLM features, data and cloud infrastructure, with specialist help where a project requires it.
Last updated:
Location
Working across London and the UK; registered office in London
Focus
Bespoke software · startups to established SMEs
Delivery
Founder-led, with specialist help where required
Availability
Taking on new work
Author
Ian Compton
Founder · Revenant Systems Ltd
Ian Compton is the founder of Revenant Systems Ltd and a software engineer with 20 years of professional experience. He works hands-on across the full stack — back-end services in Go, Node.js, and Python, web and mobile front ends, AI integration, data engineering, and the cloud infrastructure underneath: Terraform on AWS and Azure, Kubernetes, and ArgoCD-driven GitOps.
Before founding Revenant Systems, he worked as an early engineer and later an engineering leader on high-volume, real-time analytics and eCommerce personalisation: telemetry pipelines ingesting billions of events a month, and ClickHouse warehouses that worked through hundreds of billions of high-cardinality rows. That prior-role experience includes a cloud-spend redesign that cut a platform's infrastructure costs by around 60% while its traffic doubled.
His current work puts large language models into production: model selection and evaluation, typed tool interfaces that let agents drive an existing application, retrieval over a client's own data, and the guardrails that keep model output dependable once a business is acting on it.
Directly. Revenant Systems is a small, senior firm, so you deal with the engineer doing the work — no account layer, no hand-offs. I lead every engagement and stay in the engineering; where a project genuinely needs a specialist, one is brought in to work alongside me, and nothing is passed to a junior delivery team. Every engagement starts with evidence: an audit of what actually exists, then a precisely agreed scope before anything is built. Progress is reported plainly, in writing, and the work is handed over clean enough that you aren't dependent on me afterwards.
Need an experienced engineer on the work? Let's talk.
Ian Compton reads your message personally. The usual next step is a free
20–30 minute technical fit call to check the problem, scope and likely budget.