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About · Practice
About me, and how I work.
Who
I’m Noah Laratta, a software engineer in Denver. Laratta Labs is my independent practice: I build apps, the cloud and data systems that run them, and the AI agents that sit on top.
My background runs from big enterprise to member associations to my own products. I ran Kubernetes infrastructure in air-gapped and GovCloud environments for a major aerospace and defense contractor, I work on the member platform of a national sports-instruction association, and I’ve built and launched two consumer apps of my own. Across all of it, what teams need from an outside engineer is pretty consistent: someone senior who shows up, scopes honestly, and ships. That’s what I aim to be.
The setup is simple. The person who scopes your project is the person who builds it, and that’s me, every time. You deal with one person from the first call through launch.
What makes that possible is AI. Agents and automation run through everything I do, so one engineer can cover the ground that used to take a small team. It’s how I built and launched SquadUp and YardPaint, and it’s how I’d work on your project.
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.
- Runs the whole operation solo on AI tooling: launch pipelines, screenshot automation, infrastructure as code, and observability.
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 scope I write spells out what I’ll build, when, for how much, and what I’m assuming. Vague scopes are how people end up paying twice for the same work.
- 02
Done means in production
I call a project done when real people are using it, with monitoring and a runbook in place. A working staging build is a milestone on the way there.
- 03
Standard tools, interesting product
On new projects I default to well-understood, boring tools, so the interesting decisions go into what the product does. On rebuilds and integrations, the right tool is usually whatever you already run.
- 04
Agents need the same rigor
An agent in production gets the same treatment as any other system: observability, audit trails, and rollback. It can do more, faster, so the guardrails matter more.
- 05
Owning the launch
Getting the work into production is my job: writing the runbook, showing your team how it all works, and being on call if it breaks.
- 06
Straight answers
You’ll hear about cost, timeline, and risk plainly, including when something is running late and what I’m doing about it. And if I’m not the right person for a job, I’ll say so early.
- Founder
- Noah Laratta
- Entity
- Laratta Labs LLC · Colorado
- Founded
- 2026
- Locale
- Denver, CO · Mountain Time
- Team size
- 1 engineer
- Availability
- Taking new projects
- Engagement model
- Fixed price · T&M · retainer · ongoing
- Project size
- Quick fixes to multi-month builds
- Who I work with
- Startups · small businesses · mid‑market · associations
- 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 you already run
Working together