Software & product engineering
Customer and partner portals, scientific applications, LIMS extensions, internal tools — these are the critical but non-core pieces of infrastructure your business runs on.
Technology partners for life sciences
We help you build the software your science depends on.
We help life sciences teams build and run the software, data infrastructure, and engineering practice to support their science.
What we do
End-to-end technology partnership for life-science teams.
We roll our sleeves up and get deeply involved in the technical, scientific, and product decisions behind your business. We're domain expert with lots of first-hand experience building for biology.
Data, bioinformatics & AI
Production pipelines for sequencing and assay data, multi-omics platforms, analytical infrastructure, and applied machine learning — from Nextflow workflows to model evaluation and integration into scientific workflows.
Cloud, infrastructure & security
Cloud-native development and deployment that's right-sized for your business. Observability and reliability best practices and compliance-aware foundations for HIPAA, SOC 2, and GxP-adjacent contexts.
Technical strategy & advisory
Fractional CTO engagements, architecture review, build-vs-buy, vendor selection, technical due diligence, and hiring plans for in-house engineering teams.
Not sure what you need yet? Tell us what you're working on and we'll help you figure it out.
How we work
Small, senior teams that feel like a part of yours.
Expertise and accountability from end to end
We own the work from kickoff through launch for every project we tackle. No layered account teams, no offshore handoffs. The people you meet are the people doing the work.
Start with the science
Before we sketch a system diagram, we start with the research questions your teams and customers are trying to answer. We want to understand the assay, the data flow, and the regulatory context. We believe the best outcomes are built from a genuine understanding of what and who we're solving for.
Ship in small slices
Biology is hard and scope creep is real. We work in tight, two-week increments — always with something running, always something to react to. This is how we de-risk ambiguous problems and how we keep stakeholders close to the work.
Build for the team that inherits it
Our engagements are designed to be handed off cleanly. We document as we go, match the conventions of your in-house team where one exists, and prefer boring, well-understood technology over novelty. Our goal is for your future engineers — or future us — to read the code and immediately understand it.
Small on purpose
We stay small because it's the only way to keep the senior-led model honest. That means we say no to a lot of work, and we're upfront about it when we're not the right fit. When we do take on a project, you have our full attention.
Who we are
A foundation for what you build next.
A Plinth is the base a column rests on — the part of the structure no one looks at, but the part that holds everything else up. That's how we think about good technology for life sciences.
Over a decade in the trenches
We've spent more than ten years building production software, data systems, and infrastructure inside biotech and life-science companies — sequencing platforms, clinical diagnostics products, multi-omics tools, and customer-facing portals. We've shipped systems that hospitals depend on, that scientists use every day, and that have stood up under real regulatory scrutiny.
Why we exist
A lot of promising biotech and diagnostics companies don't have — and shouldn't need — a large in-house technology team. But they still need technology that's worthy of the science it supports. We started Plinth to be the team those companies call: domain-fluent, senior, and small enough to actually care.
What we believe
- Technology is part of the product, not a wrapper around it. It deserves the same rigor as the assay or the algorithm it serves.
- Boring technology wins. Especially in regulated and long-lived systems.
- Scientists are users, too. Build for them, with them.
- Small teams ship better software. Always have, always will.
Get in touch
Tell us what you're building.
We'll tell you, honestly, whether we're the right team to help. The fastest way to reach us is email — a few sentences about your project is plenty.
What helps us respond well
- What you're building. The product, the science, the audience.
- Where you are. Idea stage, prototype, in market, scaling.
- What you need from us. A specific project, a team to embed with, a second opinion.
- Timing. When you'd ideally like to start, and any deadlines in play.
We read everything that comes in, and we'll tell you plainly if we're not the right team — usually with a pointer to someone who is.