Team Lead

Production load was unpredictable, resulting in overprovisioned resources that sat idle during low-traffic periods while incurring full cost.

Migrated the overprovisioned infrastructure to a serverless model, enabling automatic scaling with load and suspension during periods of no traffic.

Significant annual savings with no capability regression. A quarterly cost review was established to prevent similar accumulation going forward.

The application had no defined feature boundaries. Work was distributed without clear accountability for who owned or oversaw development on a given area.

Defined the application into discrete feature surfaces along business flows and architecture boundaries. Assigned a primary owner per surface responsible for overseeing its development, with a backup for coverage. Boundaries were designed with intentional overlap to promote collaboration rather than isolation.

Coverage during time off improved without requiring formal management overhead. Ownership became concrete without isolating engineers from adjacent work.

Specifications were distributed across Jira and Confluence, making them difficult to maintain and inaccessible to tooling. The team was already working in a spec-driven manner, with each development phase aligned to the Jira workflow.

Moved specifications into the codebase, establishing them as a living knowledge base that grows alongside the code. Integrated AI assistance into each development phase using the specs as context, reducing ambiguity by design.

Specifications provide direct context to AI assistance across the development workflow. Developers receive accurate, low-ambiguity support without excessive prompting.

Each tax year, the Australian Taxation Office releases updated packages requiring the system to demonstrate conformance. The process previously required a full week of manual effort from one engineer.

The ATO packages include their own test suite. Built tooling to extract and inject those tests directly into the application, running the full conformance protocol end-to-end against ATO test endpoints.

Conformance verification now takes thirty minutes and can be run by any engineer on local or development servers.