Employee number eight

The environment

A fintech startup in January 2021: a product vision for regulated financial-services clients, a CTO, seven other employees, and no platform, no engineering organisation and no security posture.

The constraint

Everything had to exist at once, and every choice was permanent in the way early choices are. The product needed a platform; the platform needed engineers; the engineers needed standards, environments and a hiring pipeline; and regulated clients needed evidence they could trust all of it. One person had to sequence that without the luxuries of an enterprise behind them.

The intervention

I joined as the first technical hire outside the CTO and treated the company itself as the system to design. Platform first: foundational architecture on Azure, fully automated environments in ARM, Bicep and Terraform through Azure DevOps, and a security posture with SOC monitoring from the start. Organisation in the same motion: hiring process, resource plans and autonomous team structures, kept coherent by a tech radar, architecture principles and development standards. In May 2022 I became Managing Director and Head of Cloud Engineering: owning the technology and cloud roadmap, partnering with product, compliance and executive leadership, leading SOC 2 Type I readiness, standing up an Engineering Enablement Platform and centre of excellence, and later exploring Azure OpenAI and retrieval-augmented generation for the product.

The result

The engineering organisation grew from one technologist to more than sixty engineers across Ireland, the UK and India inside a roughly seventy-person company. Cloud running costs fell by approximately 40 percent while live environments doubled, provisioning time dropped by around 80 percent, and SOC 2 Type I readiness gave regulated clients the evidence they needed.

What I learned

Company building is system design with people in the loop. Architecture, hiring, security, budgets and client trust are one design problem, and the platform decisions and organisational decisions have to be made together or they fight each other later.

Evidence and artefacts

• Role detail, HUB