Amidship · Product + engineering

AI, where it earns its place.

We design and build software for important workflows that are difficult to get right — especially when AI, complex integrations, or difficult product decisions are involved.

From the first product decision through architecture and implementation, senior judgment stays close to the work.

Bring us the problem See the work

Calm judgment at the centre of complex systems.

Warm light crossing a calm modern architectural space facing the water

When to call us

Some problems need more than another software vendor.

Amidship is most useful when the problem is important, technically messy, and still needs judgment about what should actually be built.

  1. 01

    You have an AI initiative that needs to become a real system.

    The demo is the easy part. The harder work is fitting AI into a real workflow — with the right data, interfaces, controls, evaluation, human judgment, and operating model around it.

  2. 02

    An important workflow does not fit off-the-shelf software.

    The business has accumulated exceptions, integrations, manual decisions, and constraints that generic software does not understand. We help turn that complexity into a coherent product and architecture.

  3. 03

    You need senior product and engineering judgment before you need a whole team.

    An important initiative needs someone who can move between the business problem, product behaviour, architecture, and implementation — and stay accountable as the work becomes real.

Point of view

The model is one decision. The system is the product.

We start with the people, workflow, data, constraints, and economics. Then we decide what should be automated, what should remain deterministic, and where human judgment belongs.

AI should earn its place in the architecture. The goal is not to ship more AI. The goal is to build software that works.

Selected work

Engineering you can inspect.

Our public engineering work is inspectable. BranchBox and Agentify are active projects that show how we think about modern software systems; they are engineering and R&D proof, not client case studies.

BranchBoxIsolated feature environments
01Git worktree
02Devcontainer
03Docker network
04Database + ports

Real environments, not agent sandboxes.

BranchBox · Open source engineering

Parallel development without shared-state chaos.

BranchBox gives each feature — and each human or AI coding agent working on it — an isolated, fully provisioned development environment with its own worktree, containers, network, database, ports, and environment.

Real environments, not agent sandboxes.

It reflects a broader Amidship instinct: make boundaries explicit, preserve the real operating environment, and design the system so parallel work does not create hidden coupling.

Inspect BranchBox (opens in a new tab)
AgentifyApplication-owned agent state
01Task state
02Tools + integrations
03Knowledge retrieval
04Evaluation + human review

Models stay interchangeable. Workflow state and control paths stay with the application.

Agentify · Active R&D

The application should own the agent, not the other way around.

Agentify explores how tasks, tools, retrieval, conversation state, evaluation, and human intervention can live inside a conventional application rather than being hidden inside a model-centric framework.

Models stay interchangeable. Workflow state and control paths stay with the application.

That makes AI one component of an operable software system — something that can be understood, changed, evaluated, and governed like the rest of the product.

Inspect Agentify (opens in a new tab)
Rida Al Barazi, founder and principal of Amidship

Rida Al Barazi · Founder and principal

The person helping shape the decision stays close to the work.

Rida has spent more than two decades building software, products, and companies. He has been a founder and operator, built a software consultancy and SaaS product, and worked inside larger product organizations including Wave and Salesforce.

That range matters because difficult software problems rarely stay inside one discipline. Product behaviour changes architecture. Architecture changes what is practical to build. Implementation exposes assumptions in the strategy. Rida works across those boundaries instead of treating them as separate handoffs.

Amidship is deliberately principal-led. Rida remains involved in the important product and technical decisions through implementation, bringing in specialists around the problem when their expertise is useful.

Read Rida's writing GitHub

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Start a conversation

Have a problem that is difficult to get right?

Tell us what is happening, why it matters, and what makes it difficult. We can start there.

Bring us the problem