How we work
Every engagement is led by a senior Danish data lead and built by engineers we trained ourselves. The first step is small enough that you judge us on the work, not on the pitch.
The first step
There are two ways we usually start. The first is a one-week review: the senior lead goes through your platform, your pipelines and your backlog together with your team, and writes up what is solid, what is not, and what we would do first. The second is a scoped first project, typically eight to twelve weeks with one senior lead and one or two engineers, on a problem you have already decided needs solving.
One example of a first project is governance on an existing Snowflake platform. Week one ends with a written recommendation on account setup and edition. The following weeks put in a role model with row-level access, an inventory of personal data with masking, an audit trail your auditors can read, and the documentation to go with it. Your own team is in every walkthrough, so they can maintain it after we leave.
Both start on hourly billing with no minimum commitment, and both end with something you keep: a written recommendation, or working code in your own repositories that your team can run.
Three shapes of engagement
Scoped project on time and material
You have a defined job: a migration off SQL Server or SAS onto Snowflake, a set of data products on the platform you already run, or the groundwork an AI use case needs before anyone can trust its inputs. The senior lead scopes it and designs the solution, the engineers build it, and the lead reviews everything before it reaches you.
Billing is hourly and you can stop at any month end. You own the code and the architecture from day one. A migration is typically two to five engineers for three to six months.
Fixed-scope project at a fixed price
For a well-defined project we quote one price and stand by it. Our aim is the quality of a good Danish consultancy at a price that leaves room for the whole scope.
Team extension
Engineers joining your existing data team, or keeping the data products you already have running and growing, with our senior lead reviewing their work. Most companies asking for extra hands are better off handing us a whole problem, and we will say so.
What it costs
The senior lead is priced like a Danish senior consultant. The engineering hours are priced on Rwandan salaries, which puts them at well under half of Danish market rates. A firm quote comes out of scoping.
Roles
- The senior lead
- Scopes and designs the work, leads the engineers, reviews every deliverable, and is the person you call. Today that is Kjetil.
- The engineers
- Do the building, in your repositories, your CI pipeline and your standups, during your working hours.
The engineers
Our engineers come from Awesomity Lab in Kigali, a software firm that has delivered production systems for clients in the Netherlands, the UK and Rwanda.
Before any client work, five of them went through a three-month data engineering programme that Kjetil designed and taught: SQL, Snowflake, dbt and Terraform. They also hold certifications from Anthropic.
- Why is it affordable?
- Engineering salaries in Rwanda are a fraction of Danish ones, and we pass most of that difference on. What you pay less for is the cost of living in Kigali, not the standard of the work, which a Danish senior lead reviews before it reaches you.
- Why does the collaboration work?
- Kigali is one hour ahead of Copenhagen in winter and on the same time in summer. English is the working language in Rwanda. The engineers have been trained in how Danes give feedback, which is more direct than most of the world is used to, and it took less adjustment than you would expect.
- How is this different from offshore as people know it?
- The person leading the work is a Danish data engineer who has done the job, not an account manager. The engineers were trained on the stack you run and sit in your standups every day, instead of working from tickets on the other side of the world.
Contracts and data
Contracts are with Tamarillo ApS under Danish law.
Personal data is handled under GDPR, with the delivery team as a disclosed sub-processor under a data processing agreement.
Working with Tamarillo
The next step is a conversation about the problem you want solved.
Kjetil Erdogan Lavik, contact@tamarillodata.com, Copenhagen, Denmark
Kjetil Erdogan Lavik
Copenhagen, Denmark