Backend Engineer

New tax-form formats introduced a gap between the regulator's specification, the project timeline, and a significant number of edge cases requiring resolution.

Built calculation and messaging modules covering the bulk of submission data. Treated the specification as the source of truth and wrote tests against the example messages first.

Submissions were delivered on time and in compliance through the next tax year. The implementation held up when a second wave of format changes arrived.

Each new data integration was being built from scratch. The underlying patterns were nearly identical across integrations, but the implementations were not.

Extracted the common shape into small, composable utilities scoped to what was needed rather than a general-purpose framework.

New workflows were delivered in hours rather than days. The components have been reused by every workflow shipped since.

There was no shared artifact for non-trivial technical decisions. Architecture choices were being made in informal channels and were not preserved.

Introduced a lightweight RFC template covering context, proposal, and alternatives considered. The alternatives section is the only mandatory field.

Decisions are now documented in a persistent record the team can reference when revisiting past choices. Several decisions have since been re-validated against the original RFC.