The client
An established non-tech startup who just secured a significant Series-A raise for a growing business, with ambitious plans for multi-national expansion. The company's operations run on custom software written by an offshore agency over a number of years.
The challenge
The software was struggling to scale as the business grew. There were daily outages, and performance was dropping drastically as the volume of business increased. This was affecting customer confidence, and the client wanted to build their own technical team to bring the software in-house and solve the problems inherent to their rapid growth.
The role
I was one of the first members of the in-house team, hired as Software Architect reporting directly to the C-suite with a remit to "make it work," bring the software in-house, and help build the new team.
Was with the company for 6 months, until the software was brought in-house and the new team was fully in place. During that time, my work included:
- Aiding initial fire-fight duties to keep the system online, identifying and mitigating critical points of failure
- Creating and leading technical strategy covering key areas:
- Bringing the software estate in-house from the agency infrastructure.
- Incremental improvement to performance that minimise downtime and risk whilst maximising effect.
- Create a long-term target architecture to meet goals for expansion in order to direct and inform immediate work.
- Proposed new infrastructure to increase automation and testability, improve scalability, and reduce AWS costs.
- Working with the C-suite and product leadership to identify key aspects of the long-term plan that deliver maximum immediate value.
- Helping to grow the technical team from a small offshore agency to an in-house team of 40+.
- Helping to recruit permanent technical leadership for the team.
- Working alongside the SRE team to create a new containerised infrastructure, and accompanying CI/CD pipeline, per the technical strategy.