About Shikinox, a founder-led engineering studio

Shikinox is a founder-led engineering studio. We build SaaS products end to end, plus mobile apps, AI features and dedicated engineering teams for companies in North America. Every engagement is led directly by the founder, so you always talk to someone who writes code.

Why Shikinox exists

"I started Shikinox to give growing companies what I'd want as a client: senior engineers, honest timelines and code you're proud to own."

That sentence is the whole brief. Growing companies are often sold a senior pitch and handed a junior team. Timelines slip without anyone saying so. The code ends up somewhere the client cannot run it. Shikinox exists to do the opposite: senior people on the work, dates we can defend, and code that lives in your repositories from the first commit.

The name says the same thing in two languages. "Shiki" is the Japanese word for the four seasons. "Nox" is Latin for night. Together they describe the picture behind the brand: aurora light in a night sky, and a horizon where night turns to dawn. It is also a fair description of how we work with clients in North America. Your night is our working day, and new work is waiting when your morning starts.

Who leads the work

Mausam Bhalekar is the founder and tech lead of Shikinox. He is a full-stack engineer with 5+ years shipping production software. He leads development of a multi-tenant SaaS platform for the Canadian rental market, from its data model and Stripe billing to CI/CD on Azure, and has taken React Native apps from idea to the Play Store and App Store. He leads every Shikinox engagement personally.

That matters in practice. The person who writes your scope is the person who reviews the pull requests on it. You can read about the platforms and apps he has led in our work, starting with the tenant screening and property management SaaS that anchors our SaaS product engineering service.

You can also find him on LinkedIn and GitHub.

How we work

What a founder-led engineering studio means day to day

We work together in your morning, send updates in your afternoon and keep building while you sleep. In practice that is 4 hours of live overlap with Toronto, 9am to 1pm Eastern, for stand-ups, reviews and calls in your hours. Afternoons are async, with written updates and quick replies. Work continues overnight, so new work lands before your morning coffee.

Every project moves through the same four steps. Discover: a free call to understand your goals, users and constraints, then a written scope within 48 hours. Design: architecture, data model and a clickable plan agreed before heavy building starts. Build: two-week sprints with weekly demos, so you see working software rather than status reports. Scale: launch, monitor and grow the team as the product grows, with handover docs included.

These are the promises we make on every engagement:

• NDA signed before we start
• You own all code and IP
• Weekly demos, no surprises
• Registered business, clear invoicing
• Written scope within 48 hours
• Reply within 24 hours
• Teams start in 1 to 2 weeks

How we hire

Every engineer who joins a Shikinox team passes a technical interview and a paid trial task before they touch client work. The trial is real work, paid at a real rate, because an hour of code tells us more than a day of interviews.

Nobody works alone. Every engineer works under a senior tech lead who reviews their code, and on every engagement that lead reports to the founder. If someone leaves, we replace them at no cost, with overlap and a written handover, so your project does not stall while a new person gets up to speed. This is how we staff dedicated teams, and it is why teams usually start in 1 to 2 weeks rather than months.

What we will not do

• Start before the NDA is signed. Everyone on the project signs one too.
• Keep your code. All code, designs and IP transfer as we go, in your repositories.
• Put an engineer on your project without a senior lead reviewing their work.
• Send status reports in place of working software. You get a demo every week.

If that sounds like the way you want to work, start a project. We reply within 24 hours.