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About · Practice
About me, and how I work.
Who
I’m Noah Laratta. Laratta Labs is the engineering practice I run out of Denver — full-stack applications; the cloud, pipelines, and automation that run them; and the AI systems and agents on top.
My background runs from large enterprise to member associations to my own products: Kubernetes infrastructure in air-gapped and GovCloud environments for a major aerospace and defense contractor, the member platform of a national sports-instruction association, and two consumer apps designed, built, and shipped end to end through this studio. Laratta Labs is built around what mid-market companies tend to need: a senior engineer who shows up, scopes honestly, and ships.
The structural promise is simple. The person who scopes the work is the person who builds it — me, every time. I take on two or three engagements at once on purpose, so each one gets attention that doesn’t scale.
What makes that workable is being AI-native. The whole practice runs on AI agents and tooling, so one senior engineer covers the speed and breadth that used to take a team — without handing your project to junior hands or losing it in a chain of handoffs. It’s how I designed, built, and shipped SquadUp and YardPaint end to end, and it’s the same way I work on yours.
2026 – now
Laratta Labs
Founder & engineer
- Designed, built, and shipped SquadUp (social fitness platform — iOS, GraphQL API, Stripe payments and host payouts) and YardPaint (consumer AI landscaping app — iOS, Cloudflare Workers, two-step AI pipeline), both live on the App Store.
- The studio doubles as the proof of the AI-native delivery model: launch pipelines, screenshot automation, infrastructure-as-code, and observability, all run by one engineer.
2025 – now
National sports-instruction association
Full-stack engineer
- Built an offline-first web app for on-mountain assessment of instructor certifications — fully usable without connectivity at altitude, syncing when back online.
- Designed and shipped member event self-cancellation with tiered refunds end to end, integrated with the association management system.
- Raised member-portal and admin frontends past 90% test coverage, gated deployments on those suites, and stood up AI-powered automated PR review across the stack.
2022 – 2024
Aerospace & defense contractor
Software engineer
- Deployed and ran Kubernetes clusters on AWS GovCloud and in air-gapped environments — Helm, monitoring, incident response, and the security compliance work that regulated environments demand.
- Owned software and database deployments as the team's go-to for release and infrastructure issues.
- 01
Scope concretely
Every project I scope names the deliverables, the timeline, the price, and the assumptions I'm working from. Vague scopes are how you end up paying twice for the same thing.
- 02
Production is what counts
A working staging build doesn't count as done. I close the project when real users are using it, with monitoring and a runbook in place.
- 03
Standard tools, interesting product
On greenfield projects I default to well-understood, boring tools so the interesting decisions can go into what the product does, not how it's deployed. On rebuilds and integrations, the right tool is usually whatever stack you're already running on.
- 04
Agents need the same rigor
Production agents need the same operational discipline as any other system: observability, audit trails, rollback. The leverage is bigger, so the rigor has to be too.
- 05
Owning the launch
I'm responsible for getting the work to production — writing the runbook, training your team, and being on call if it breaks. The merged PR is the start of my work, not the end.
- 06
Clear on the practice
I write code; I don't write strategy decks. I take the projects I can scope and ship. Being clear about that up front makes the rest of the conversation easier.
- Founder
- Noah Laratta
- Entity
- Laratta Labs LLC · Colorado
- Founded
- 2026
- Locale
- Denver, CO · Mountain Time
- Team size
- 1 engineer
- Engagements
- 2–3 active at once
- Engagement model
- Fixed price · T&M · monthly retainer
- Typical project
- 6–14 weeks
- Industries
- Mid-market · associations · ops-heavy
- Specialties
- Full-stack · cloud & pipelines · AI / agents
- Approach
- AI-native — agent-assisted delivery
- Default stack
- TypeScript · Postgres · Claude · Swift
- Cloud / infra
- AWS · Azure · GCP · Docker · Kubernetes · CI/CD
- Adapts to
- Whatever your existing stack already is
Working together