Radar Blue is a custom software studio for organizations where the software has to be right — government, nonprofits, healthcare, climate, civic tech, and the founders building what comes next. We design, build, modernize, and scale the systems your team depends on. No bloat. No lock-in. No jargon.
We've spent a decade watching enterprise SaaS, "AI transformation," and bottomless modernization contracts move through agencies, hospitals, nonprofits, and growth-stage companies. The same patterns show up every time.
Off-the-shelf tools that fit the RFP, not the work. The team ends up bending its workflow to match the software, instead of the other way around.
Critical apps on legacy stacks. Nobody on the team can change them without fear, and nobody can replace them without budget.
Vendor demos that look great on stage. Then they leak PII, hallucinate decisions, or fall apart the moment they hit real production data.
Codebases that shipped fine at ten thousand users and melt at a hundred thousand. Schemas from a three-week sprint that became the company's bottleneck. Performance debt that compounds the moment marketing works.
Most engagements start with a discovery sprint or a second opinion. From there we either keep going, hand the plan to your team, or recommend a partner who's a better fit. No lock-in, no retainers you can't end.
A short, fixed-fee engagement to map the real problem before anyone writes a line of code.
Modern web applications built around your team's workflows — and around the load you'll have in three years, not just the load you have today.
Strangler-pattern migrations off legacy stacks — ColdFusion, classic ASP, Access. Decomposition of architectures that worked at one size and broke at the next. Modular services where they earn their complexity, not by reflex.
Targeted AI features — not chatbots glued onto every page — with the evals, guardrails, and human review the work demands.
Independent review of vendor proposals, technical plans, and build-vs-buy decisions — from someone who has no stake in selling you the answer.
We focus on organizations where the software has consequences — eligibility, care, safety, science, money, the public record. The verticals vary; the discipline doesn't.
State, local, federal
Foundations, advocacy, service
Providers, payors, public health
Grids, mitigation, adaptation
18F-style, Code for America
Transparency, accountability, community engagement
Labs, universities, instruments
Founders we'd build alongside
Procurement teams have been burned. So have program leads. Our process holds up to scrutiny from both.
A 30-minute call to make sure we're a fit. If we're not, we'll tell you who is.
No NDAs, no slide decks, no obligation.
Two to four weeks, fixed fee. We embed with your team, learn the work, and produce a written plan.
You own the artifacts. If you take them to another vendor, that's fine.
Iterative delivery in two-week increments. Working software in your environment from week one.
Your team is in the codebase from day one. We don't build in a black box.
Documentation, runbooks, and working sessions until your team is comfortable owning it.
We'd rather you not need us in two years than be locked in for ten.
Fluent in the legacy stacks you inherited and the modern systems you'll need next.
Adam Safran
Founder & principal engineer
"I started Radar Blue in the early 2000s with a small, creative team of engineers. We built grant management, content management, crime mapping, and records systems for organizations like LAPD and the Jewish Community Foundation of LA. Then I spent a decade in Silicon Valley. Teams brought me in when an architecture they'd shipped at startup speed wasn't surviving production load. The work was untangling monoliths, growing engineering teams, and shipping platforms at the kind of volume where edge cases stop being edges. I'm bringing both sides of that experience to the same problem in any sector that has it: software the work depends on, where shipping the wrong thing has consequences."
Ran an engineering consultancy doing records, content management, crime mapping, and grant administration for public agencies, foundations, and data-driven companies. Multi-year engagements with LAPD, the Jewish Community Foundation of LA, and Levelwing. Shipped in ColdFusion, classic ASP, PHP, and early Rails — back when those were the modern stack.
2000 – 2017
A decade in Silicon Valley at Life360, Turo, and Middesk. Brought in when an architecture that got a company through product-market fit was melting under what came next. The work: untangling monoliths, growing engineering teams, fixing the slow paths, and building platforms at billions-of-events scale the org could trust.
2016 – 2025
Radar Blue is back, applying modern product engineering and pragmatic AI to organizations where the software has to be right — public agencies, mission-driven nonprofits, regulated industries, and the founders building what comes next. Same name. New stack. Same conviction: the people doing high-stakes work deserve software that respects them.
2026 –
Not certifications. Disciplines we bring to every engagement — from a state agency's case-management rebuild to a municipal records modernization to a regulated startup's first AI feature.
Accessibility isn't a final pass. We build to WCAG 2.2 AA from the first commit and test with screen readers before release. We hold internal tools to the same standard as public-facing ones — the people who use them have the same needs.
Every meaningful change leaves a trail your team — or an outside auditor — can read. We capture who did what, when, and why, by default. These are the practices behind SOC 2 controls. We follow them whether certification is on the table or not.
Security is a property of the system, not a layer bolted on at the end. We design so no part of the system knows more, holds more, or does more than its job requires. We've shipped systems handling protected health information under HIPAA. We apply the same discipline whether the regulation is named in your contract or not.
We build for the team that will own the system in five years — not the team writing it today. Plain stacks, documented decisions, and an architecture your team can take over. Modernization engagements end with a working handoff, not a perpetual retainer.
We default to open-source tools so you're never one acquisition, license change, or pricing model away from losing your stack — or your data.
We pick proprietary components when they earn it; we don't default to them. For public-sector and regulated environments, this isn't ideology — it's risk management. Your data, your runtime, and your future options stay yours.
We work alongside your compliance, security, and procurement teams — never instead of them. Your specialists own sector-specific frameworks like FedRAMP, CJIS, PCI DSS, and GDPR; we engineer with their requirements in mind.
A 30-minute call to understand the problem, sanity-check the approach, and decide whether a discovery sprint or a second opinion makes sense. No deck, no sales engineer, no obligation.
30 minutes · video or phone · no obligation
Before we meet, you'll share