Contract engineering · GeneralQuery Technologies · Berhampore, India
We build the system. Then we make it able to tell a person is there.
QueryLabs is General Query's engineering practice. We take contract work: small team, senior hands, production systems. We're also the only team that deploys QueKey, the identity layer our lab builds.
The practice
No bench. No account managers. The people who build QueKey are the people on your project.
Model · contract, defined term
Concurrency · three engagements, maximum
Working hours · embedded with your team
Reporting · directly to you
Most agencies sell you a delivery org and staff it with whoever is free. We can't do that and don't want to. QueryLabs is a working practice attached to a research lab, which means the constraint is real: we take a small number of engagements at a time because the rest of the week belongs to QueKey and Strata.
What you get in exchange is the thing agencies charge extra for and rarely deliver. The engineers who designed a patent-pending authentication framework are the engineers writing your migration. There is no layer between the brief and the build.
We work best when we can see the whole system: the product, the data model, the internal tools, the places where humans are still doing what software should. Scoped narrowly we're still useful. Scoped widely we're worth the constraint.
Fewer clients is not a limitation we apologise for. It's the reason the work is good.
Engagements
Three ways this starts. Most of them start in the middle.
You do not need to know which one you need. Describe the problem and we'll tell you which of these it is, including when the answer is that you shouldn't hire anyone yet.
01 · Exclusive
Presence deploymentQueKey
QueKey and the IAF protocol integrated into a product you already have. OAuth wiring, verification flow design, re-verification on high-value actions, fallback tiers. We're the only team that does this, because we're the team that built it.
Fixed scope
02 · Most common
Build, then deploy
You can't put proof of presence on a system that doesn't exist yet. So we build the system first: the product, the platform, the integrations, the interface. Presence goes on top when you're ready for it, and not before.
Phased
03 · Bounded
Contract engineering
Defined scope, defined term, embedded with your team. A migration you've been postponing, an integration three vendors have failed at, a rewrite that needs someone senior for a quarter. We work inside your repo and your standup.
Retainer or fixed
What QueKey actually is
A credential proves the account. It has stopped proving the person.
Asserts · human presence
Protocol · IAF, patent pending
Integration · days, not a standards migration
Deployment partner · QueryLabs, exclusively
Forging a person used to be expensive. A face, a voice, a document, a plausible history: all of it is cheap to synthesise now, and convincing enough. Okta, Auth0, Clerk and WorkOS verify credentials. Passkeys verify a device. Every one of them answers is this the right account.
QueKey answers the other question. It's an identity provider your application consumes over ordinary OAuth, and what it returns is an assertion that a human being was present at the moment of the request.
That's useful the first time at login. It's more useful everywhere else: onboarding you need to trust, a research panel that shouldn't contain synthetic participants, a payout above a threshold, a session that's been open for six hours and can no longer vouch for who's driving it.
QueryLabs is where that gets deployed. General Query builds the layer. We put it inside real products, and what breaks in the field goes back to the lab.
What we work on
The substrate. Unglamorous, and the reason anything else is possible.
Product and platform
Web applications and SaaS products built from scratch or taken over mid-flight. Architecture that survives the next two years of your roadmap.
Most engagementsIntegration
Making systems that were never designed to talk to each other do it reliably. Legacy stacks, vendor APIs, data that lives in four places and agrees in none.
Where teams get stuckWorkflow automation
The manual steps between your tools. CRM and messaging orchestration, scheduled pipelines, the operational glue nobody wants to own.
Fast paybackInterface design
Screens designed against real use, not a component library. We design what we build, which keeps the handoff honest.
Included, not upsoldBrand and identity
Marks, type systems and the written rules that keep them intact after we hand over. Guidelines you can hold someone to, not a mood board.
Published as a bookIdentity and access
Auth that holds up: session handling, permissions, onboarding flows, and presence verification where the stakes justify it.
Our specialismApplied AI
LLM integration inside real products, model training and fine-tuning, and generative AI features scoped to what your data can actually support.
Growing fastContext systems
Strata, the lab's research into structured memory across AI assistants. Not a service yet. Say so if you want to hear when it is.
In researchThe record
What we've shipped, and what we haven't yet.
This page will name clients when those clients agree to be named. Until then it lists what exists and what stage it's at. We'd rather be briefly boring than quietly inventing a portfolio.
Identity provider asserting human presence. Built in-house at General Query, deployed by this practice.
Interoperable Authentication Framework. The protocol underneath QueKey's verification model.
Contract builds in delivery and two published case studies. Write-ups go up as each one closes and permission comes through.
Structured memory across AI assistants. Research stage at the lab, no client deployments.
Why a lab has a practice
The engagements pay for the research. They also correct it.
QueKey · identity, live
IAF · protocol, patent pending
Strata · context, in research
QueryLabs · this practice
GeneralQuery Technologies is a research company working on two questions: whether software can tell that a person is present, and whether a person can tell what a system understands. QueryLabs is the commercial arm that funds that work.
That's the honest version and it's also the useful one. A liveness engine fails in a lab the way you designed it to. In the field it fails differently: bad lighting, a five-year-old front camera, a shared device, a user who won't move their head. We only find those cases inside real deployments, which means the contract work isn't a detour from the research. It's the instrument.
So when you hire us you're getting a team with a reason to care how your system behaves eighteen months from now. That's not a values statement. It's an incentive.
Read the lab's thesis →Send a brief
Tell us what's broken. We'll tell you honestly whether we're the right team.
No discovery call to schedule a discovery call. Write to us in whatever detail you have, and you'll get a real answer from someone who would be doing the work.
What the system does today, and where it stops doing it.
Who it's for, and what changes for them if this works.
What's already been tried, including what failed.
When you need it, and what you've budgeted.