Scaling cloud and engineering capability

Context

As Director of Software Architecture for Fidelity's APS division, and later Director of Architecture in Personal Investing, I inherited organisations at the start of their cloud journey: tentative AWS experiments, deep on-prem habits, and a digital transformation strategy that assumed engineering capability the org did not yet have.

The constraint

Cloud adoption was gated on people, not technology. A strategy document does not teach an engineer to think in events, infrastructure as code or serverless economics. Every new project paid the same learning tax again.

The intervention

I treated capability itself as the system to build. Tentative AWS experiments were turned into a multi-year cloud strategy with live cloud-native applications behind it, on infrastructure-as-code patterns that let later projects start from a working foundation instead of a blank page. I created live-coding workshops across serverless, Alexa and machine learning, then in Personal Investing scaled the idea into a developer learning dojo: self-contained, cross-platform katas covering full solution development, pipelines included, upskilling teams concurrently across global locations. My team of fifteen built the cloud-native event-driven platform underneath the digital experience ecosystem, with its domain boundaries defined in Event Storming and domain-driven design sessions I ran with the business. As tech owner of the labs group I also kept a hand in experiments and MVPs, including early distributed-ledger work.

Outcomes

• Tentative cloud experiments became a funded multi-year cloud strategy with multiple live cloud-native applications.
• The learning dojo and cloud centre of excellence were adopted by multiple teams across global sites.
• Reusable infrastructure patterns cut the time and cost of every subsequent project.
• Labs MVPs were evaluated fast enough that roughly one in five proofs of concept earned funding, with six-figure savings per funded project.
• An event-driven platform became the backbone of the digital experience ecosystem.

Capability gained

Developer enablement as a discipline: dojos, katas, reference architectures, centres of excellence. And the realisation that architecture is a teaching job as much as a design job.