Enterprise Developer Platform

The Challenge

A Series B fintech company had grown from 15 to 80 engineers over 18 months. The infrastructure that worked at 15 engineers was buckling under the load of 80 — inconsistent environments, no clear deployment process, and a support burden falling on two platform engineers.

The business needed to triple engineering output without tripling the platform team.

The Solution

We designed and built a full Internal Developer Platform using a GitOps-first approach:

• Backstage as the developer portal for service creation, documentation, and ownership
• ArgoCD for all deployments, eliminating manual kubectl commands
• Crossplane for self-service infrastructure provisioning (databases, queues, storage)
• Kubernetes with Istio service mesh for observability and traffic management
• Prometheus + Grafana + Loki for a unified observability stack

The platform was designed around the concept of a “golden path” — a paved road from idea to production that the vast majority of engineers could follow without raising a ticket.

Technical Architecture

Developer → Backstage → GitHub (PR) → ArgoCD → Kubernetes
                              ↓
                    External Secrets Operator ← AWS Secrets Manager
                              ↓
                    Crossplane (Infrastructure)

All infrastructure is declared in Git. All deployments are reconciled by ArgoCD. No manual changes to production, ever.

The Results

Within 90 days of launch, 95% of the engineering team was using the platform for all deployments. The two platform engineers who previously spent most of their time on support tickets could now focus on expanding the platform’s capabilities.

The business went on to achieve a successful Series C fundraise, with the platform cited in due diligence as a key technical asset.