Energy
Software engineering for Oil & Gas
Oil and gas is heavy industry in unforgiving places: offshore platforms, remote terminals, hazardous areas where a spark is a catastrophe. Here software is safety-critical and the physical environment is the design constraint, not a detail. We build for connectivity that drops, hardware that has to survive, and consequences measured in lives and environmental harm, honest that in this sector reliability and safety beat novelty every time.
Why the domain matters
Oil and gas is one of the most physically demanding environments software can be built for, and that physicality shapes everything. The work happens on offshore platforms hundreds of miles from shore, at remote onshore terminals, along pipelines that cross hostile terrain, and inside refineries and processing plants where the margin for error is measured in human lives and environmental catastrophe. Software here is not a productivity tool sitting comfortably in an office: it is often part of a safety-critical system operating in a hazardous area, over a connection that drops, on hardware that has to survive heat, vibration, salt and explosive atmospheres. The industry that mishandles that reality does not ship a buggy app; it risks people and the environment.
The sector splits into upstream, midstream and downstream, and software lands differently across the chain. Upstream (exploration and production), generates enormous volumes of subsurface, drilling and production data, and lives with the harshest and most remote operating environments. Midstream (pipelines, terminals, transport and storage), is a real-time monitoring and control business, watching flow, pressure and integrity across vast distances where a leak or a rupture is both a safety and an environmental emergency. Downstream (refining and processing), is complex, continuous heavy-process operation where a plant runs for years and unplanned downtime is enormously costly. Across all three, asset integrity, inspection and the safe operation of equipment that fails dangerously are the constant thread. We keep this page to that hydrocarbon-specific, safety-critical, heavy-industrial reality; the broader sector sits with energy, and grid-and-retail with power and utilities.
We are a senior-led team and we operate what we build, so we start from the physical and safety reality rather than from a product we would like to sell. The recurring failure mode in this sector is software written as if it were running in a data centre with reliable connectivity and no physical consequences: an application that assumes the network is always there, that latency does not matter, that a wrong reading is just a display glitch. In oil and gas none of those assumptions hold. We would rather build the system that degrades safely when the link to shore drops, that respects the hazardous-area constraints on the hardware it runs on, and that treats a control or integrity decision with the seriousness its consequences demand, than the slick tool that has never met an offshore platform.
The challenges in oil & gas
Safety-critical systems where wrong is catastrophic
Much of the software here sits in or beside safety-critical systems, where a wrong reading, a missed alarm or an unsafe control action can cost lives and cause environmental disaster. This is a fundamentally different discipline from ordinary software: the failure modes have to be reasoned about deliberately, the system has to fail safe rather than fail silent, and the seriousness of a mistake shapes every design decision. Treating a safety-critical control or integrity function like an ordinary feature is how avoidable tragedies happen.
Remote, harsh and offshore environments
The operating environment is often hundreds of miles offshore or in remote onshore locations, with connectivity that is intermittent, expensive and slow. Software that assumes always-on, low-latency networking simply does not work here. It has to function during a link outage, sync sensibly when connectivity returns, and make sound local decisions when shore is unreachable, because a platform cannot stop operating safely just because the satellite link to head office has dropped.
Hazardous-area and physical hardware constraints
Equipment in and around processing areas operates in hazardous, potentially explosive atmospheres, which constrains what hardware can be deployed and how, certified equipment, intrinsic-safety limits, and devices that must survive heat, vibration, salt and dust for years. Software cannot ignore the physical envelope it runs in; a design that assumes ordinary commercial hardware in an ordinary environment is not deployable in the places that matter most in this industry.
OT and SCADA estates that are mission-critical and long-lived
Production, pipeline and plant operations run on deep SCADA and control-system estates that have been operating reliably for years or decades and cannot be casually disturbed. New software has to integrate with this OT world carefully, respecting the boundary between control systems and corporate IT, because a careless connection to a live control system is a safety and security risk, not just an integration inconvenience. Reliability and stability outrank novelty every time.
Asset integrity across ageing, high-consequence equipment
Pipelines, pressure vessels, rotating equipment and offshore structures degrade, and managing that integrity (inspection scheduling, corrosion and defect tracking, remaining-life assessment), is central to operating safely. The data is heterogeneous, the consequences of a missed defect are severe, and the software has to support genuine engineering judgement about high-consequence equipment rather than replacing it with a number nobody can defend when a regulator or an incident investigation asks how a decision was made.
HSE regulation woven through operations
Health, safety and environmental regulation is not paperwork bolted on beside the work in this industry. It is central to how operations are permitted to run, from safety cases to permit-to-work systems to environmental monitoring and reporting. Software that touches operations has to capture, evidence and support these obligations faithfully, because getting them wrong is not a compliance footnote; it is a matter of whether the operation is allowed to run at all and whether people go home safely.
What we build for oil & gas
The systems this sector most often needs, built by engineers who understand the domain, not just the code.
SCADA and OT integration
Software that integrates with production, pipeline and plant SCADA and control systems safely and with the appropriate boundary, turning operational data into monitoring, analytics and decision support without ever treating a live control system as an ordinary data source. We build with deliberate segmentation and controlled data flows, because in this sector a careless connection to OT is a safety and security exposure, not just a technical shortcut.
Asset integrity and inspection systems
Integrity-management software for high-consequence equipment: inspection scheduling and history, corrosion and defect tracking, anomaly management and remaining-life assessment across pipelines, vessels, structures and rotating equipment. We build these to support the integrity engineer’s judgement with defensible data and a clear audit trail, because a missed defect is a safety and environmental event and every integrity decision may have to be justified to a regulator or an investigation.
Production and subsurface data platforms
Platforms that make sense of the enormous data volumes upstream generates (production data, well and reservoir information, drilling and subsurface data), ingesting, reconciling and making it usable across systems that were never designed to agree. This is heavy, mission-critical data engineering where reliability and correctness matter far more than novelty, and where a great deal of the real value in upstream software lives.
Pipeline and terminal monitoring
Real-time monitoring and operational software for midstream: flow, pressure and integrity monitoring across pipelines and terminals, leak and anomaly detection, and the operational tooling that helps operators watch assets spread across vast distances. We build these with the seriousness a leak or rupture demands (as safety and environmental events first and operational metrics second), and with sensible behaviour when connectivity to a remote asset degrades.
Field and offshore applications built for the environment
Applications for technicians and operators in the field and offshore that are built for the real conditions: intermittent connectivity, offline-capable workflows that sync when the link returns, and interfaces usable in harsh conditions by people wearing gloves in bad weather. We design for the platform and the terminal, not the office, because software that assumes a good connection and a comfortable desk is useless where the work actually happens.
HSE, permit-to-work and environmental compliance
Software supporting the safety and environmental systems that operations depend on: permit-to-work, safety-case-related workflows, incident and observation reporting, and environmental monitoring and reporting. We build these to capture and evidence what the regulatory framework requires faithfully, because in oil and gas these are not administrative overhead. They are part of what makes the operation safe and permitted to run.
Where we help
An integrity system that supports the engineer, not replaces the judgement
An operator managing ageing pipelines and vessels needs inspection history, corrosion and defect tracking, and remaining-life assessment in one defensible system. The real work is heterogeneous integrity data made consistent and a workflow that supports the integrity engineer’s judgement about high-consequence equipment, with an audit trail that stands up when a regulator or an incident investigation asks how a decision was reached. Built honestly, it reduces the chance of a missed defect; built as a black box, it produces a number nobody can defend.
A field app that works when the connection does not
Technicians offshore or at remote sites need to capture inspection results, complete permits and log work where connectivity is intermittent at best. We build offline-capable workflows that function fully during a link outage and sync sensibly when connectivity returns, with interfaces usable in harsh conditions by gloved hands. The measurable win is work captured accurately at the point it happens; the trap we avoid is an app that assumes a connection the platform does not have and so gets abandoned for paper.
Pipeline monitoring that treats a leak as the emergency it is
A midstream operator watching flow, pressure and integrity across a long pipeline network needs to detect leaks and anomalies quickly across vast distances. We build monitoring that surfaces genuine anomalies clearly, behaves sensibly when connectivity to a remote asset degrades, and treats a potential leak as a safety and environmental emergency first, because in midstream a monitoring tool that buries a real event in noise, or goes blind when a link drops, is a liability rather than an asset.
Turning production and subsurface data into something usable
An upstream operator drowning in production, well and subsurface data across disconnected systems needs it reconciled and made usable for engineering and operational decisions. We build the heavy data engineering, ingesting large, heterogeneous volumes, reconciling them and making them consistent across systems that were never designed to agree, because in upstream the value is in trustworthy, reconciled data that engineers can actually rely on, not in another dashboard on top of data nobody trusts.
How we build for oil and gas
We start from the physical environment and the safety consequences, not the screens. Before designing anything we want to understand where the software will really run: offshore, at a remote terminal, in a hazardous area, over a link that drops, and what happens if it is wrong. In this sector the environment and the safety case are the design constraints, and software that has never reckoned with a platform, a hazardous area or an intermittent satellite link will not survive contact with the operation, however good it looks in a demo.
We are blunt about the difference between safety-critical and ordinary software. Where a system sits in or beside a safety-critical function, it has to be reasoned about deliberately: failure modes understood, fail-safe behaviour designed in, and the seriousness of a mistake reflected in how carefully it is built and tested. We will tell you plainly which parts of a system carry that weight and which do not, rather than treating a control or integrity function with the casualness of an ordinary feature, because the consequences here are measured in lives and environmental harm.
We treat connectivity, hardware constraints and OT boundaries as core engineering, resourced from the start. Software that assumes always-on networking, ordinary hardware and a free hand to connect to control systems is not a smaller version of the right thing in this sector: it is undeployable in the places that matter. We design for intermittent connectivity and offline operation, for the hazardous-area and environmental envelope the hardware must survive, and for a deliberate, secure boundary between OT and corporate IT, from the first design decision rather than the last.
Because we operate what we build, the people designing an integrity workflow or a pipeline-monitoring system are the ones who understand that a missed defect or a buried leak alarm is a safety event, not a support ticket. That concentrates the mind on the failure modes that actually matter in heavy industry, and it keeps us honest about the trade-offs (reliability over novelty, safe degradation over convenient assumptions), up front rather than discovering them when the system is live in an unforgiving place.
Regulation and compliance
Health and safety regulation is central to how oil and gas operations are permitted to run, not a compliance layer beside them. The regulatory framework around major-hazard operations: safety cases, the duties on operators, and the oversight of offshore and onshore installations, shapes what operations are allowed to do and how, and software that touches operations has to support and evidence these obligations faithfully. Getting them wrong is not a footnote; it bears on whether the operation is permitted to run and whether people are safe.
Operational safety systems such as permit-to-work, isolation and safe-system-of-work processes are often the practical expression of the safety case, and where our software supports them it has to capture and evidence exactly what the process requires, at the right time, with a trustworthy record. These are the systems that keep people alive when work happens on hazardous equipment, so we build them with the seriousness that demands rather than as ordinary administrative workflows.
Environmental regulation runs alongside the safety framework: emissions and discharge monitoring, spill prevention and reporting, and the environmental obligations that come with operating major hazard facilities. Software that supports environmental monitoring and reporting has to be accurate and defensible, because in this industry an environmental figure is not a marketing number; it is a regulatory obligation with real consequences for getting it wrong.
We build systems that support and evidence these obligations, but we are engineers, not your safety, environmental or legal advisers. The duties around major-hazard operations, safety cases, permit-to-work and environmental compliance carry serious legal and human weight, and accountability for them rests with your own HSE, engineering and legal functions and the competent authorities. Our job is to build software that captures, evidences and supports what those obligations require, and to work alongside the people accountable for them.
Integration
Operational technology is the gravitational centre here. Production, pipeline and plant SCADA and control systems, historians and instrumentation hold the physical truth of what the assets are doing, and most of the value in this software comes from turning that operational data into monitoring and decision support. We integrate with the OT estate carefully and with a deliberate security boundary, because these are mission-critical, long-lived systems and a careless connection to a live control system is a safety and security risk, not merely a technical one.
The physical environment shapes integration as much as the systems do. Remote and offshore sites connect over intermittent, expensive links, so integrations have to tolerate outages, buffer and sync sensibly, and avoid assuming the network is always there. We design data flows that degrade gracefully and reconcile when connectivity returns, because an integration that only works on a good connection is an integration that fails exactly when the platform is most isolated.
Engineering and enterprise systems: maintenance and asset-management platforms, integrity and inspection tools, production and subsurface data stores, and ERP, all have to exchange data with the operational world, and they rarely agree in format, timing or meaning. We treat reconciliation across this heterogeneous estate as first-class engineering, because in oil and gas an integrity or production decision made on data that does not tie out across systems is a decision that cannot be defended when it matters.
The recurring engineering problem across all of it is the same: moving data reliably between mission-critical OT, engineering systems and enterprise platforms that were never designed to agree, across a physical environment that will not cooperate. We resource that reliability and reconciliation as core work rather than an afterthought, because in this sector the data backbone underpins decisions with safety and environmental consequences, and it has to be trustworthy before anything built on top of it can be.
Security and critical national infrastructure
Oil and gas is critical national infrastructure, and systems that touch production, pipelines and processing sit under the NIS Regulations and the heightened expectations that come with facilities where compromise can cause physical harm. This is not a compliance checkbox: an attack on operational technology in this sector can translate into a safety and environmental event, so we build with the security posture as a first design decision rather than a report handed over at the end.
The boundary between operational technology and corporate IT is the central security concern. SCADA and control systems were designed for isolated, trusted environments, and connecting them to the wider world for monitoring and analytics has to be done with deliberate segmentation, strictly controlled data flows, and a clear understanding of what must never be reachable or controllable from outside. We treat that OT boundary as a safety-critical security architecture problem, because in this industry the line between a data breach and a physical incident can be thin.
The remote and offshore nature of operations adds its own exposure: devices and links in physically distant, sometimes physically accessible locations, and the temptation to weaken security for the sake of connectivity in difficult conditions. We resist that trade-off deliberately, building strong authentication, scoped access and resilient design that hold up in the field, because a security compromise reached through a remote site is no less serious for being far from head office.
Because we operate what we build, security here is not a document produced at handover. We instrument for the access patterns and anomalies that indicate a problem, keep the audit trail an investigation or a regulator would need, and design for resilience against the reality that critical energy infrastructure is a deliberate target. In a sector where a security failure can become a safety failure, keeping the ability to detect, contain and reconstruct what happened is part of what we build, not something found missing after an incident.
What changes
Software that survives the environment it runs in
Because we design for intermittent connectivity, hazardous-area constraints and the physical reality of offshore and remote sites, the software keeps working where the work actually happens (functioning through a link outage and syncing when it returns), rather than being an office tool that gets abandoned for paper the first time the platform loses its connection.
Safety-critical decisions that are defensible
By building integrity, monitoring and control-adjacent systems with the seriousness their consequences demand (fail-safe behaviour, clear anomaly surfacing and a trustworthy audit trail), the decisions they support stand up to a regulator or an incident investigation, rather than resting on a number nobody can defend when it matters most.
Operational data your engineers can actually trust
Because we treat OT integration and reconciliation across heterogeneous systems as core engineering, the production, integrity and monitoring data the software surfaces ties out and can be relied on, which is what lets engineers make high-consequence decisions on it instead of quietly working around another dashboard they do not trust.
What we build for oil & gas
From a first platform to modernising what you already run. The disciplines this sector draws on most.
How we deliver
- 01
Discover
We map the system, the constraints and the business it serves, including the parts nobody documented.
Architecture brief
- 02
Architect
Decisions get made, written down and defended before a line of production code exists.
Decision records
- 03
Build
Short cycles against working software. You see progress in the product, not in a status deck.
Shipping increments
- 04
Operate
Monitoring, incident response and iteration. The system is alive, so the engagement is too.
Runbooks & SLOs
Building something for oil & gas?
Tell us the problem and the constraints you are working under. A senior engineer will give you a straight view on what it would take, and say so plainly if we are not the right team for it.
Technologies we work in
Chosen per problem, not per fashion. A selection of the stack we most often reach for.
Why teams in oil & gas choose us
We build for the platform, not the office
A lot of software for this sector is written as if it runs in a data centre with reliable connectivity and no physical consequences. We start from the offshore platform, the remote terminal and the hazardous area (intermittent links, harsh conditions, safety consequences), because software that has never reckoned with that reality does not survive contact with the operation.
We take safety-critical seriously as a discipline
Where a system sits in or beside a safety-critical function, it demands deliberate reasoning about failure modes and fail-safe behaviour, not the casualness of an ordinary feature. We are clear about which parts carry that weight and build them accordingly, because in oil and gas the consequences of getting it wrong are measured in lives and environmental harm.
We treat the OT boundary as safety-critical security
Connecting to production, pipeline and plant control systems for the value in their data is where this software is won or lost. We treat the boundary between OT and corporate IT as a deliberate, safety-critical security architecture from day one, because in this sector a careless connection to a live control system is a physical risk, not just a technical one.
We operate what we build
The people who design an integrity workflow or a pipeline monitor are the ones who understand a missed defect or a buried leak alarm is a safety event, not a support ticket. That keeps us focused on the failure modes that matter in heavy industry and honest about the trade-offs (reliability over novelty, safe degradation over convenient assumptions), up front, not in production.
Related sectors
Part of Energy. Adjacent sectors we also know.
Common questions
Can you build software that works offshore and at remote sites with poor connectivity?
Yes, and we treat connectivity as a core design constraint rather than an assumption. Offshore platforms and remote terminals connect over intermittent, expensive links, so we build offline-capable workflows that function fully during an outage and sync sensibly when connectivity returns, with interfaces usable in harsh conditions by gloved hands. Software that assumes always-on, low-latency networking simply does not work where this industry operates, so we design for the link dropping from the start, because a platform cannot stop working safely just because the satellite connection to head office has gone, and an app that assumes a connection it does not have gets abandoned for paper.
How do you handle safety-critical systems?
As a fundamentally different discipline from ordinary software. Where a system sits in or beside a safety-critical function (a control action, an integrity decision, an alarm), the failure modes have to be reasoned about deliberately, the system has to fail safe rather than fail silent, and the seriousness of a mistake shapes how carefully it is built and tested. We are clear about which parts of a system carry that weight and which do not, and we build the safety-critical parts accordingly. To be clear on the boundary: we are engineers, not your safety authority, so safety-case and HSE sign-off rests with your own engineering and HSE functions and the competent authorities, and we build to work alongside them.
Can you integrate with our SCADA and control systems safely?
Yes, and safely is the operative word. Production, pipeline and plant SCADA and control systems are mission-critical, long-lived and hold the physical truth of what the assets are doing, so we integrate with a deliberate security boundary: segmentation, strictly controlled data flows, and a clear understanding of what must never be reachable or controllable from outside. We turn operational data into monitoring and decision support without ever treating a live control system as an ordinary data source, because in this sector a careless connection to OT is a safety and security risk, not just an integration inconvenience. Reliability and stability outrank novelty every time.
What can you do for asset integrity and inspection?
We build integrity-management software for high-consequence equipment, inspection scheduling and history, corrosion and defect tracking, anomaly management and remaining-life assessment across pipelines, vessels, structures and rotating equipment. The important design principle is that it supports the integrity engineer’s judgement with defensible, reconciled data and a clear audit trail, rather than replacing that judgement with a black-box number. In a sector where a missed defect is a safety and environmental event and every integrity decision may have to be justified to a regulator or an investigation, the ability to defend how a decision was reached is as important as the decision itself.
Is security different for oil and gas because it is critical infrastructure?
Yes, materially. Oil and gas is critical national infrastructure and falls under the NIS Regulations, and the crucial difference is that a security compromise can become a safety and environmental event, not just a data breach. The central concern is the boundary between operational technology and corporate IT: we build with deliberate segmentation, controlled data flows and a clear understanding of what must never be reachable from outside, and we resist the temptation to weaken security for connectivity at remote sites. Because we operate what we build, the instrumentation, audit trail and resilience against a determined attacker are part of the deliverable, because in this sector detecting and containing an incident can be the difference between a contained event and a physical one.
Building for oil & gas?
Tell us what the system has to do and what it cannot get wrong. A senior engineer reads it, and if oil & gas is not a domain we know well enough to be useful in, we will say so rather than learn it on your budget.
- 01A senior engineer reads it. Not a form queue, and not an account manager.
- 02We reply either with questions or with a straight answer that we are not the right fit.
- 03If it looks like a fit, a technical call with the person who would actually run the delivery.
- 04Then scope, effort and risk in writing, before anyone signs anything.