PenDraco Limited Company is a Texas company, established in 2020, headquartered in Pearland. We have sharpened a decade of senior engineering practice into a single offer: the Forward Deployed Engineer model, democratized for the businesses that need it and could never reach it before.
Our motto is Ego Magnus Numen. We take it to mean that the work should carry its own weight, that a thing built well and owned through adoption is its own argument. Our mark says the same thing in a single line: a pen tracing a dragon. The pen is the craft, the act of building. The dragon is the hard problem, made manifest.
Steve A. Onoja, Founder & Principal Engineer
Steve spent roughly ten years at Qlik, from 2016 to 2025, rising through Senior Implementation Consultant, Technical Architect, and Senior Principal Platform and Technical Architect to Master Principal Customer Success Engineer, Qlik's top technical band. He earned two President's Awards and spoke at QlikWorld and Qlik Connect three times. He left at the end of 2025 to run PenDraco full-time.
The through-line of his career is forward-deployed engineering before the title existed: embed with the customer, build the solution, ship it into their production environment or inside their own product, and own it through adoption. He has done it for medical-billing SaaS (Kareo), P&C insurance OEMs (Insurity, which won Qlik NA OEM Partner of the Year 2023 on the portal he built), global enterprises (Lenovo, 330,000-plus seats), and healthcare (Tampa General Hospital). He has also delivered .NET middleware inside US Army NIPRNet and SIPRNet environments and Qlik Alerting into the DoD's ADVANA platform, which is the foundation of PenDraco's credibility on regulated and data-sensitive work.
A decade of embed, build, ship, own, before it had a name
A few proof points from that record:
- Medical-billing SaaS (Kareo). Embedded in the customer's AWS and Snowflake environment to rescue a failing five-node cluster. Nightly reload time cut from 50-plus hours to 20; application reload success raised from 4 of 84 to near-complete.
- P&C insurance OEM (Insurity). Built an underwriter next-best-action and outlier-scoring engine and shipped it inside the customer's own product, proof of concept to production. Recognized as Qlik NA OEM Partner of the Year 2023.
- Global enterprise (Lenovo). Owned the on-premise architecture across 330,000-plus seats and 120,000-plus active users, then led the migration to Qlik Cloud.
- Insurance (Erie). Rebuilt a failing deployment as AWS infrastructure-as-code (Terraform and Packer), migrated an embedded database to RDS, and brought a multi-node high-availability cluster live on the contract date.
- Healthcare (Tampa General Hospital). Led an analytics migration to self-managed Azure with PHI segmentation, serving roughly 92,000 users.
The same embed, build, ship, own approach is now applied at the size of business that needs it most. PenDraco's current work includes managed ERPNext / Frappe implementations, agentic and on-device AI systems on infrastructure we operate, an ASP.NET Core OAuth service, a versioned multi-platform design system, MCP integrations, a consumer iOS app with on-device machine learning, and a tax-filings Frappe app.