Victoria, BC · Established 2022

Mission-critical software,
built to keep running.

Black Iris is a Canadian software consultancy delivering production systems for governments, emergency services, and growing companies. We design, build, and operate the systems other teams can't afford to have go down.

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Beacon platform
23,000+ hrs · SOC 2-aligned
Government delivery
BC & Alberta · since 2022
Production AI
NLP · RAG · LLM integrations

Operating globally

Systems that stay awake
while the world sleeps.

From provincial government portals to emergency dispatch in the field — we build for the moments that can't fail.

Services

What we build

Full-stack engineering for systems that need to be reliable on day one and on day one thousand.

Web platforms

Production web applications across Rails, Node, Python, Java, and modern JS frameworks. Built for scale, accessibility, and long-term maintainability.

Mobile applications

Native and hybrid mobile apps that integrate cleanly with your backend. Real-time messaging, offline support, and field-tested in critical operations.

AI & LLM features

RAG-based chatbots, NLP entity extraction, AI-assisted dispatch, and LLM integrations with Anthropic and OpenAI — deployed in production, not demos.

Government digital services

Embedded delivery in BC and Alberta agile teams. Experience with OpenShift, GitHub Actions, accessibility standards, and provincial governance frameworks.

Performance & reliability

Diagnosing memory leaks, concurrency bugs, and performance degradation in live systems. We operate what we build — not just ship it.

Security & compliance

SOC 2-aligned controls, HIPAA-compliant handling of sensitive data, Canadian data residency, AES-256, and audit-ready operational practices.

Selected work

Production systems, not portfolios.

A few of the platforms we've designed, built, and continue to operate.

Emergency response 2022 – present

Beacon — Trek Medics International

One of North America's most widely used emergency medical dispatch platforms. Real-time, event-driven, SOC 2-aligned, HIPAA-compliant. Over 23,000 person-hours delivered. AI-assisted dispatch extracts incidents from unstructured email; a RAG-style analytics chatbot answers operational questions across distributed data sources.

  • Ruby on Rails
  • Sidekiq
  • PostgreSQL
  • AWS
  • MQTT & real-time sockets
  • NLP & LLMs
trekmedics.org →
Provincial government 2022 – 2023

gov.bc.ca — Ministry of Citizens' Services

Full-stack development on the GDX team modernizing the official website of the Government of British Columbia. Refactored a legacy monolith into Java/Spring Boot microservices communicating over Kafka. Front-end migration into React 17 + Next.js with WCAG accessibility, localization, and SSR.

  • Java / Spring Boot
  • Kafka
  • React
  • Next.js
  • OpenShift
  • GitHub Actions
Provincial government 2023 – present

Government of Alberta — Child Care Subsidy & Employment Services

Embedded full-stack delivery on Alberta's Child Care Subsidy platform and the Ministry of Jobs & Economic Development's training and employment services portal. Worked within established government governance, security, and agile frameworks.

  • Public sector delivery
  • OpenShift
  • CI/CD
  • Accessibility
Multi-tenant SaaS 2022 – present

OnVolunteers, SportsHelpers, StudentsHelping

Technical delivery partner behind three multi-tenant volunteer management platforms serving schools, youth sports leagues, and nonprofits. End-to-end system design, full-stack development, and a RAG-based conversational AI assistant grounded in pgvector embeddings of the administrator manual.

  • Angular
  • Rails
  • PostgreSQL + pgvector
  • AWS
  • RAG

Clients

What our clients say

Yazan and Black Iris have been trustworthy development partners for the past 3 years. They are thorough in understanding requirements, exceptional at communication, and consistently deliver extremely high-quality software, on time and on budget. Without reservation, I wholeheartedly recommend Black Iris.
Dionisio Santos, Founder & Director, OnVolunteers Software

Writing

Notes from the build

Practical posts on architecture, hosting, and shipping production software.

What 23,000 hours on a real-time dispatch system taught us about Postgres

Connection pooling realities, JSONB pitfalls, replica lag, and the boring scaling pattern that actually worked.

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AI in life-critical systems: what you can't afford to vibe-code

Where LLMs earn their keep, where they get banned, and the eval harness you need before any of it ships.

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Government RFPs are how you should write every spec

A contrarian take. The rigour public-sector procurement forces is exactly what most startup PRDs are missing.

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RAG is the easy part. Retrieval is the hard part.

Most teams over-index on the LLM and under-invest in chunking, recall metrics, and grounding. Here's the fix.

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The Canadian data residency trap

"Canadian-hosted" doesn't mean what most teams think. Hidden gotchas in AWS Canada and what privacy reviews actually check.

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SOC 2 Type 1 is a starting line: a small-team field guide

What the audit actually requires, what it doesn't, and a realistic 90-day path for small teams whose buyers just started asking for the report.

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Contact

Let's build something durable.

Tell us what you're working on. Most engagements start with a short call to scope the problem before any commitment.