A financial services startup had built a micropayments reconciliation platform that combined small payments owed to users into amounts that made sense to transfer via banking applications instead of the traditional paper check. The platform was processing $2M per day in transactions, but the delivery pipeline was stalled. Environment deployment relied on a convoluted Ansible process that took 30 days. I was originally brought in to accelerate their DevOps strategy, and the engagement grew into a 3-year retainer that lasted all the way through to acquisition.
The Engagement
The first priority was unblocking delivery. I rebuilt the environment provisioning in Terraform and containers within 2 days, bringing new environment deployment from 30 days down to 20 minutes, including all secrets injection, data seeding, user creation, and SSL certificates. The development team could spin up complete environments on demand without waiting on DevOps.
Over time, the platform evolved from basic container services on AWS to full Kubernetes, and individual change deployments reached 2 minutes. I hired, trained, and managed a dedicated DevOps team built to sustain the operating model independently. As the platform matured, I worked with the team to build SOC1 and SOC2 compliance controls into the deployment path rather than bolting them on after, so every deployment was compliant by default. Regulatory approval that had previously consumed entire business days of manual review was automated into a release pipeline.
I led architecture decisions across serverless, container, and data workloads under delivery pressure, with the platform scaling to 1.5 billion serverless invocations over 12 months with zero downtime on $2M in daily transaction volume. The technology posture, team capability, and compliance automation built over 3 years contributed directly to the company's acquisition readiness.
Results
- Environment deployment: 30 days to 20 minutes for full environment provisioning, 2 minutes for individual deployments after migration to Kubernetes.
- Regulatory approval: hours of manual review compressed to minutes through automated release pipeline.
- Platform uptime: zero downtime across 12 months on $2M in daily transaction volume.
- Scale managed: 1.5 billion serverless invocations over 12 months, SOC1/SOC2 compliance maintained throughout.
- Exit readiness: technology posture and team capability built over a 3-year retainer contributed to successful acquisition.