Independent software & platform consulting · Wisconsin
Rush Creek Labs builds production applications and the platforms that carry them — application engineering, multi-platform Terraform delivery, architecture review, and technical due diligence.
Scope is defined up front and judged against four measures, not against hours logged or meetings attended.
Every engagement is scoped against these, and reports against them when it closes.
How long a change takes to get from merged to running in production.
How often you can ship without a coordination meeting first.
How often a deploy is the thing that caused the incident.
How long production stays broken once someone notices.
Services
Each one exists to move a specific measure. If an engagement can’t name which, it isn’t worth running.
01
Enterprise-grade applications built to be operated, not just delivered — web applications, APIs, and internal platforms that hold up after the person who wrote them moves on.
02
Multi-platform Terraform systems that manage identity, device, and cloud tenants as code — plan on pull request, apply on merge, with automated drift detection running against live state.
03
A structured assessment of the systems already in production: how deployments actually run, how failures get handled, and what the platform underneath is quietly committing you to.
04
Technical due diligence and durability review for small teams — the questions that matter before a raise, an acquisition, or the departure of whoever built the first version.
How engagements work
Scope is defined before work starts. Phase 1 is a fixed technical review that stands on its own whether or not later phases follow.
A defined review of the systems in question — application architecture, deployment path, failure handling, configuration management, dependency risk — at a price and an end date agreed before it begins.
A document, not a debrief: what was found, what it currently costs against the four measures, and what to do about it in priority order. It is yours to act on with or without me.
Optional, and scoped directly from the findings. Applications, pipelines, Terraform, drift detection, rollback paths — built and handed back as a system your own team operates.
Engagements are delivered personally and are not subcontracted. The person who runs the assessment is the person who writes the findings and builds the implementation.
Capabilities
Four things this practice is accountable for. The specific stack under each one is a detail that turns over every few years.
Production applications with real users and real uptime expectations — web applications, APIs, and internal platforms. Twelve years of it, starting with control-systems and vulnerability-management tooling for an electric cooperative and running through application and platform work at a global manufacturer.
CI/CD treated as a product with its own users and its own uptime. Plan-on-PR and apply-on-merge pipelines, drift detection, release engineering, and the centralized platform work that makes those the default rather than the exception — most recently as the architect of an enterprise-wide delivery platform.
Identity, device, and cloud tenants managed as reviewed code instead of console clicks: Terraform across Okta, Jamf Pro, Microsoft Intune, and Azure. The value is the audit trail and the rollback path, not the tool that produces them.
Conversational interfaces, retrieval architecture, and MCP servers, built with the same discipline as anything else that has to stay up. Currently doing this at healthcare-consumer scale, where the hard part is the surrounding system rather than the model.
Background
Phil Sime is the founder and principal consultant at Rush Creek Labs, and delivers every engagement personally. Twelve years of engineering, spent moving in one direction: from writing applications, to building the platforms that ship them, to the systems work that makes production AI reliable.
That path ran through web and control-systems applications at an electric cooperative, then nearly eight years at Trane Technologies — senior application developer, then DevOps leader running a team, then DevOps Domain Architect, where he led the design and adoption of a centralized delivery platform used across the enterprise. Today he is Lead AI/ML Engineer at Optum, building conversational AI for healthcare consumers.
The range is the point. The same person can write the application, build the pipeline that ships it, and tell you which of the two is actually costing you lead time — without three vendors disagreeing about whose problem it is.
Before engineering: four years in the U.S. Army as an infantry squad leader, including a deployment to Iraq in 2007–2008. Rush Creek Labs LLC is a veteran-owned practice based in Wisconsin.
Contact
No form, no discovery funnel. Phase 1 scope and price come back in writing.
Rush Creek Labs