About Forgeway Systems
A focused consultancy and product engineering partner for enterprise platforms
We help organizations that need their platforms to work across teams, vendors, and long-lived systems. Our approach combines API strategy, integration engineering, governance, and observability into a cohesive practice that reduces technical debt and increases delivery velocity.
Our mission
To help enterprise teams build, govern, and operate API platforms that are reliable, secure, and easy to evolve—so they can deliver value faster without accumulating technical debt.
We believe that enterprise software should be a competitive advantage, not a bottleneck. Our work focuses on the integration, governance, and observability challenges that slow down teams and create risk. We combine deep technical expertise with product thinking to deliver solutions that work in the real world—not just in demos.
Operating principles
These principles guide how we work with clients, approach problems, and measure success.
Rigor over speed
We take time to understand your systems, constraints, and goals before recommending solutions. This reduces rework and builds trust.
Clarity over complexity
We favor simple, well-documented approaches over clever abstractions. Your team should understand and maintain what we build.
Shared ownership
We work alongside your teams, not instead of them. Knowledge transfer and enablement are part of every engagement.
Outcomes over outputs
We measure success by the impact on your team's velocity, system reliability, and developer experience—not just deliverables.
Our team
A small, focused team of engineers, architects, and strategists with deep enterprise experience.
Mara Ellison
Chief Executive Officer
Mara founded Forgeway Systems after spending 15 years leading platform engineering teams at Fortune 500 companies. She saw firsthand how fragmented integration approaches created technical debt that slowed delivery and increased risk. Mara built Forgeway to help organizations treat their APIs and integrations as products with clear ownership, governance, and long-term maintainability. She holds a Master's in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon and speaks regularly at enterprise architecture conferences.
Grant Holloway
VP of Platform Engineering
Grant leads our platform engineering practice, bringing deep expertise in distributed systems, event-driven architecture, and cloud-native infrastructure. Before joining Forgeway, he spent a decade at a major financial services firm where he led the migration from monolithic ESB architecture to a modern API platform serving 200+ internal teams. Grant is passionate about building systems that are observable by default and resilient to failure. He contributes to several open-source integration projects and mentors early-career engineers.
Priya Nanduri
Director of API Product Strategy
Priya bridges the gap between technical implementation and business outcomes. She helps organizations define API products that align with strategic goals, establish versioning and deprecation policies, and measure developer experience. Previously, she led API strategy at a healthcare technology company where she increased third-party developer adoption by 300% over two years. Priya holds an MBA from Wharton and a technical background in software engineering. She's a frequent contributor to API design standards communities.
Elliot Mercer
Head of Reliability Systems
Elliot ensures our clients' platforms are reliable, observable, and easy to operate. He specializes in distributed tracing, SLO/SLI definitions, and incident response processes that reduce mean time to recovery. Before Forgeway, he was a principal SRE at a major cloud provider where he built observability tooling used by thousands of engineering teams. Elliot is the author of several technical guides on integration monitoring and is a regular speaker at reliability engineering conferences. He believes that observability is not just a technical concern—it's a team culture.
Our culture
We're a team of engineers, architects, and strategists who believe that enterprise software should be built with rigor, clarity, and shared ownership. We work alongside our clients' teams, not instead of them. Knowledge transfer and enablement are part of every engagement.
We value depth over breadth. Our team members have spent years working in the complex, messy reality of enterprise systems—integrating legacy platforms, governing APIs across dozens of teams, and building observability into distributed architectures. We bring that experience to every engagement.
We're committed to continuous learning. Our team contributes to open-source projects, speaks at industry conferences, and shares what we learn through technical guides and best practices. We believe that the enterprise software community is stronger when we share knowledge openly.
Want to learn more about how we work?
Schedule a conversation to discuss your integration challenges, platform goals, and how we can help your team ship reliable, governed APIs faster.
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