Fintech · Team leadership · Pipeline
Fintech Product Launch
- Period
- 2023 — 2024
- Role
- Lead Frontend Engineer
- Industry
- Fintech
- Result
- 30days to ship
The challenge
What was the problem
Joined a payment-processing product four months behind schedule. Two developers, no release process, no staging environment, no idea when the first version would ship. Customer pressure was mounting and leadership was running out of patience.
The approach
How I solved it
- Spent the first week auditing the codebase, the team, and the dependency surface — surfaced three blocking risks before writing any code
- Hired and onboarded six engineers across frontend, backend, QA and PM in three weeks — defined clear scope and responsibilities for each role from day one
- Built a three-environment pipeline from scratch — dev → staging → production — with automated deploys and pre-prod regression on every merge
- Replaced ad-hoc handoffs with structured release cycles — weekly cuts, daily standups, single-source release notes
- Pair-coded the most fragile modules with the original two developers to transfer ownership without slowing delivery
Stack
Tools that did the work
- Next.js
- React
- TypeScript
- Node.js
- GitLab CI
- Cypress
The outcome
What was delivered
- Team grew from 2 to 8 people across roles
- First production release in 30 days — vs. four-month delay before I joined
- 3-environment pipeline stable from day one with zero rollback incidents in the first quarter
- Release cadence settled at weekly — predictable enough for the customer to plan integrations against
Have a similar problem?
30-minute call, no pitch — let's see if I'm the right fit.