The Challenge

After two decades of feature-first development, this market-leading company faced a critical inflection point. Following an acquisition, their new CTO made a bold decision: pause feature development to address mounting technical debt that was threatening business growth.

Key pain points included:

20+ years of accumulated technical debt across multiple platforms

50 engineers stuck maintaining legacy systems instead of innovating

Inefficient deployment processes causing frequent production issues

Knowledge silos between Infrastructure and Software teams

Unmanageable microservices architecture lacking observability

Our Solution

We became an extension of their team, taking complete ownership of legacy systems while enabling their engineers to focus on building the future.

1. Comprehensive Migration Strategy

Led "The Big Migration" - transitioning 15 legacy applications to a new V2 AWS environment managed with Terraform and infrastructure as code, with strict security controls.

2. DevOps Transformation

Implemented 12-factor principles across all applications, moved from Jenkins to GitHub Actions, and established automated testing and deployment pipelines.

3. Observability Implementation

Deployed Datadog monitoring across the entire stack, enabling proactive incident response before customer impact and reducing average weekly errors by 50%.

4. Security Remediation

Established continuous security scanning, remediated over 1,000 security vulnerabilities, and achieved PCI compliance for the organization.

Implementation Timeline

Phase 1: MVP (Months 1-2)

Embedded with client teams to understand the technical environment, completing initial migrations while building comprehensive system knowledge.

Phase 2: Independent Operations (Months 4-6)

Took full ownership of legacy systems, accelerating migration pace while client engineers transitioned to new development work.

Phase 3: Stabilization & Optimization (Months 7-12)

Continued migrations while implementing monitoring, security improvements, and operational excellence practices.

Phase 4: Long-term Partnership (Year 2+)

Maintaining and improving legacy systems while supporting gradual modernization efforts.

Results & Impact

The transformation delivered measurable business value beyond technical improvements:

By taking ownership of Ruby on Rails, React, Java, and Elixir applications, we enabled the client's team to build new services in modern languages, dramatically improving employee satisfaction and business capabilities. The improved platform stability directly contributed to the significant sales conversion increase.