Rebuilding an R&D org and a country-scale real-time news platform

When I joined as CTO, the R&D was down to a handful of engineers keeping the systems alive. There were no teams to lead, so I built them, hiring full-stack, mobile, QA and DevOps from scratch, setting the hiring bar and the engineering standards that turned a support crew into a delivery organization.

With the org in place I reviewed the whole technology stack and moved the platform to a modern architecture, microservices on Kubernetes with proper CI/CD pipelines, replacing systems that had grown by accretion for years.

The hardest test was the group’s real-time news and alerts platform, a product whose traffic explodes exactly when the country needs it most. I redesigned its architecture and led a full rewrite, backend, frontend and the mobile apps. Before the rebuild the system went down at peaks of around 200 thousand users. After it, the platform holds one to two million users at peak and stays up through crisis-level spikes.

Along the way infrastructure spend came down 4 times, mostly from replacing oversized legacy systems with services that scale up when traffic comes and back down when it leaves.