You passed the questionnaire and still can’t produce the evidence your auditor asks for. We wire Vanta, Drata, or Secureframe on day one, implement the controls behind the certificate, and ship a Type II evidence pipeline your acquirer’s CTO walks through without flinching.
A certificate proves you sat the exam. Evidence proves you do the work every day. We close that gap with senior engineers, an audit-defendable pipeline, and a fixed-price 5-day audit before any code ships.
Her UK SaaS scale-up had spent six months on an in-house attempt: two engineers part-time, no observability, no audit log, a Confluence page with the runbook. The acquirer’s CTO walked the codebase pre-LOI and said it cold: “Rip and replace, or take a 25% diligence haircut.”
The certificate wasn’t the problem. The evidence behind it was. Nobody could show who touched what data, the restore had never been tested, and the questionnaire answers didn’t match the running system.
We rebuilt over 12 weeks. Senior engineers paired daily, ADRs written same day, evidence pipeline wired on day one. The acquirer’s CTO walked the same surface, signed full-team retention, and the deal closed at ask. This page is for the founder or CTO who decided compliance is a build problem, not a paperwork problem.
Every SOC 2 engagement we’ve shipped since 2021 carries the same six load-bearing controls. Each one is hard to retrofit, and each one is the difference between a clean opinion and a list of exceptions. Open any row.
Vanta, Drata, or Secureframe pulls evidence from your cloud, code, and HR systems automatically. No screenshots the night before audit. The auditor reads live data, not a snapshot.
Every write logged with actor, tenant, IP, and timestamp. Tenant-admin viewable, exportable, searchable. When the auditor asks who touched what when, you answer in seconds.
Quarterly access reviews on a calendar, leaver access revoked the same day, least-privilege enforced in IAM. The control most teams fail on first audit, automated from the start.
Backups run and the restore is tested. DR drill on the calendar, RTO and RPO documented, restore under four hours. The control auditors ask you to evidence, not just describe.
Data encrypted at rest and in transit, keys in KMS, secrets in Vault or Secrets Manager. No credentials in code, no shared logins. The questions every security questionnaire opens with.
Versioned sub-processor list, signed DPAs and SCCs on file, vendor risk reviews logged. Procurement and the auditor read the same register, and it’s always current.
Every team that emails us about SOC 2 is fighting one of these eight things. Each one is impossible to fix the week before audit. Each one is a single architectural decision made on day one of our build.
“A workflow died silently. The customer found out before we did.”
Per-workflow observability + alerts. PagerDuty and Slack on every critical path. Trace IDs end to end. On-call reads the trace and knows what happened in sixty seconds. The customer never finds out first.
“Who did what, when? No record. The SOC 2 auditor flagged it.”
Append-only audit log on every mutation. Actor, tenant, IP, timestamp on every write. Tenant-admin viewable, exportable. The control that turns a list of exceptions into a clean opinion.
“The cloud bill spiked and nobody knew why.”
Per-workload cost tags + budget alerts. Every workload tagged, every budget alerted. The bill stabilises within thirty days and you can name the line item, not guess at it.
“The backup runs. The restore has never been tested. A real disaster would end careers.”
Restore rehearsed quarterly. DR drill on the calendar. RTO and RPO documented and tested. Restore under four hours. Evidence the auditor can read, not a paragraph in a policy.
“One engineer knows the whole system. Our bus factor is one.”
Two-senior pairing + same-day ADRs. Two senior engineers paired daily, every decision written into an ADR the same day. Bus factor goes from one to four. The next CTO opens the repo and stays.
“An enterprise prospect asked for SOC 2, a DPA, and a sub-processor list. We had none.”
Procurement pack ready on day one. SIG-Lite, CAIQ, DPA, SCCs, and your SOC 2 stance shipped by default. Vendor security review clears in days, not the six weeks that loses you the deal.
“The ICO asked for a record and we couldn’t produce it inside thirty days.”
DSAR runbook + audit-log export. A DSAR runbook plus a one-click audit-log export. The thirty-day deadline becomes defendable, and right-to-erasure is honoured at the schema, not promised in a policy.
“Our acquirer’s CTO walked the codebase and threatened a 25% diligence haircut.”
ADR pack + evidence pipeline + Type II stance. The brief and ADRs we ship are the documents the diligence team asks for. Three times in 2024-25 the acquirer’s CTO walked the surface and signed full-team retention.
The connectors and controls that turn a compliance platform from a dashboard into a working pipeline. Each one done a dozen times, wired right the first.
Platform implementation partner. Connectors mapped, controls scoped, evidence collected automatically from day one.
Cloud-side evidence wired into the pipeline. Threat detection, config drift, and audit trail feeding the auditor directly.
Change-management evidence: reviewed PRs, protected branches, signed commits. The control auditors love and most teams skip.
Joiner, mover, leaver flows from your HR system and identity provider. Access reviews and offboarding evidenced automatically.
SAST, dependency scanning, and a triage SLA. Findings tracked to closure with evidence the auditor can read.
SIG-Lite, CAIQ, DPA, SCCs, and the sub-processor register. The pack your enterprise buyer’s security team clears in days.
Eighteen SOC 2 engagements have stress-tested these picks. Tier 1 runs every build. Tier 2 is what we reach for when the brief needs it. Tier 3 is the infrastructure that carries the evidence to your auditor.
Nadia’s SaaS, in real numbers. Six months of part-time in-house work rebuilt in twelve weeks with senior pairing, same-day ADRs, and an evidence pipeline live on day one. Type I readiness reached in nine weeks, retention signed before close.
We don’t publish prices on a page. Every SOC 2 scope is different. Pick the shape that fits and Mohit will send your real number inside 24 hours.
One week, fixed cost. Two senior engineers read your estate and brief, then hand you the gaps and the plan.
8 to 14 weeks of fixed-scope shipping. Audit-led, evidence-pipeline-first, observable, multi-cloud comfortable.
After handover. One senior engineer keeps the evidence pipeline green and the controls live through your Type II window.
“Their CTO walked our codebase a second time, signed full-team retention, and the deal closed at ask.”
— Nadia, founder, UK SaaS scale-upPain-first, soft-second. The questions every CTO asks once the questionnaire lands and the deadline is real.
The audit week is fixed at £8K. After that, every SOC 2 evidence engineering sprint is line-itemed into the scope document: evidence pipeline, audit log, access reviews, DR, procurement pack, auditor liaison. You see the cost of each piece and you can cut any piece. Most sprints we sign land between £35K and £65K on an 8-to-14 week fixed-price basis. If we can’t hit your budget, we tell you in week one and you walk away with the audit brief, no commitment.
No. We work in place wherever possible. SOC 2 type ii readiness is about the controls and the evidence, not a rewrite. If a migration genuinely helps, we scope it at the audit and run old and new in parallel until you sign off. Your code lives in your GitHub org from commit one, and IP assigns on commit, not on final payment.
With the ADR pack, the audit log, the live evidence pipeline, and your Type II stance, not a policy PDF. The acquirer’s CTO walks the running surface and reads the same data the auditor reads. We’ve done this three times across 2024-25, and each time the CTO signed full-team retention rather than recommending a diligence haircut.
We implement Vanta, Drata, and Secureframe, and we’ll tell you straight which fits your stack rather than which pays a referral. The platform is the dashboard. The work is wiring the connectors, mapping the controls, and making sure the evidence the platform shows matches the system that’s actually running. That wiring is the SOC 2 evidence engineering most teams underestimate.
Type I readiness is achievable in 8 to 12 weeks once the controls are engineered, because Type I is a point-in-time check. Type II then needs an observation window, typically three to twelve months, during which the evidence pipeline keeps running on its own. The retainer keeps that pipeline green through the window so you don’t scramble the week before the auditor returns.
Yes. AWS is our default and we’ve shipped on GCP, Azure, Cloudflare, DigitalOcean, Vercel, and Fly.io. The evidence pipeline pulls from whichever clouds you run, the audit log is tenant-aware, and the lock-in path is documented so a later board demand doesn’t become a panic project.
Every engagement runs with two senior engineers paired, not one, and every decision is written into an ADR the same day. If one engineer leaves, the other has full context the next morning. In seven years two engineers have left mid-project, and both handovers were inside 48 hours. The seniors who sign your scope are the seniors who ship and maintain, 96% retention across the studio.
No. You walk away cleanly. The handover pack includes the architecture brief, ADRs, runbook, DPA, and a tour of the evidence pipeline for your next engineer. The Type II monitoring retainer is optional, cancellable with 30 days’ notice any month, and most teams run it only through their first Type II window before ending it without ceremony. No lock-in, no deposit forfeiture, no surprise renewals.
soc 2 evidence engineering, in context — the dashboards, flows and components your team actually ships, reviews and maintains.
Tell us your current estate, your deadline, and your target outcome in five lines. Mohit reads every first email and replies inside 24 hours: a clear yes, a clear no, or the one question that decides it, plus the next audit slot.
Yes, no, or the deciding question. Straight to your inbox, not a team thread.
We map the gaps, write the ADRs, and hand you a risk matrix with a fixed-price quote.
Controls engineered, evidence pipeline live, the brief your acquirer’s CTO reads cold.