cloud infrastructure / fintech · May 2025 – Oct 2025
Migrating consumer-finance infrastructure across five African markets
- FastAPI
- React
- Next.js
- PostgreSQL/RDS
- AWS ECS
- Terraform
- SQS
- Datadog
The problem
Yellow Africa runs solar and digital-device consumer finance across five African countries on a purely serverless API Gateway + Lambda platform. Serverless had gotten the platform this far, but the operational blind spots were starting to show.
What I did
- Led one engineer alongside my own hands-on work on an incremental migration from serverless to containerised AWS ECS services — 5 of roughly 10 services moved, without a stop-the-world rewrite.
- Built a shared authentication service adopted across all new services, eliminating duplicated auth logic across the platform.
- Replaced basic CloudWatch logging with full Datadog observability — APM, custom dashboards, automated alerting — so the team caught issues before users did.
- Ran internal “nursery day” training sessions to upskill the wider Yellow engineering team on the new architecture and patterns.
Outcome
The migration pattern was adopted by the broader Yellow engineering team independently, beyond the services I touched directly — the sign it was solving a real problem, not just moving code around.