About Fabrastra

A London engineering consultancy, founded by an engineering leader with nearly 20 years of building and running platforms in energy, insurance and financial data.

Who you'll work with

Eakan Gopalakrishnan founded Fabrastra and leads every engagement.

Eakan started as a database engineer in 2007 and has since moved into software engineering as an engineer, then tech lead and later embraced engineering leadership. He has worked in telecom billing, financial market data, insure tech and most recently energy domains and has worked with teams across the globe.

Along the way: re-architecting systems that had become hard to change, setting up platform, site reliability and quality engineering teams, building hiring pipelines and career frameworks, and making on-call something engineers volunteer for. Fabrastra brings that experience to organisations that need it.

Eakan holds an MSc in Web Technology from the University of Southampton, have run workshops on domain-driven design, Event Storming and trunk-based development, and have hosted community of practices for Engineering Managers and Weekly Tech Share for engineers.

Collaborators so far have been from London, Bristol and Edinburgh; Lisbon, Poland and Romania; New York; Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata; the Philippines; and Melbourne.

Track record

Results from previous roles. We describe employers and clients by sector and never name them.

£2.4M a year estimated saving from consolidating a billing platform's services onto a central platform (energy)
97% faster set-up of new customer environments, after making a central deployment platform production-ready (energy)
20% fewer incidents after introducing journey testing with a new quality engineering team (energy)
Over 80% faster response times for users around the world (financial data)
100% on-call sign-up from site reliability engineers, after game days built their confidence in handling incidents (energy)

Writing

Eakan writes about engineering leadership at softwarecraftsperson.com. A selection, by topic:

Leadership

Teams

Architecture and reliability

AI and delivery

What the name means

Fabrastra joins two Latin words: fabrica, the workshop, and astra, the stars.

Fabrica is the root of "fabric" and "fabricate". It stands for hands-on craft: we do the work inside your team, not from the sidelines.

Astra is from per aspera ad astra, "through hardship to the stars". It stands for ambition, and for the products we aim to build.

The order matters: workshop first, stars second. We earn insight by doing the work, then join the points we see across clients into patterns, the way stars are joined into a constellation. That is what our star chart shows: bright stars joined to draw an F, with a gold star rising from it.

Craft

Crafted with care, passion and pride, so it stays something to be proud of.

Intellect

Clear thinking before code. We measure first, then decide.

Ambition

We aim high for our clients, and say plainly what it will take to get there.

Tell us what you're building

Describe the problem, and we'll reply with how we would approach it.

Email hello@fabrastra.com

Or follow us on LinkedIn.