SHEET FIG.3 — /en/work/english-tech-lead
CASE STUDY § 01-3
Tech Lead in an English-language environment
Tech Lead
ROLE
English as the working language
LANGUAGE
infra redesign · CI/CD · organization
SCOPE
Challenge
When infrastructure lags behind business growth, the setup loses clarity and becomes hard to change. The existing GCP infrastructure had structural issues, and the blast radius of each change was hard to read.
At the same time, the development process and organization needed to be built out. English was the working language, and design, operations, and hiring all ran in English.
Design decisions
- After evaluating the issues in the existing infrastructure, chose a from-scratch redesign starting at the VPC rather than partial fixes
- Codified the infrastructure with Terraform so that change history and reviews could be handled under version control
- Set up CI/CD with GitHub Actions and standardized the deployment path
- Outsourced forensics and vulnerability assessment to an external vendor, and handled selection and coordination
- Designed the development process around scrum, and included running it and hiring in the role
Hover, focus, or tap a node to see the design rationale for each element.
- Issue assessment — evaluated the structural issues in the existing GCP infrastructure. The starting point for the redesign.
- Terraform — redesigned from scratch starting at the VPC. Codified the setup and placed it under version control.
- GitHub Actions — set up CI/CD and standardized the deployment path.
- Security assessment — forensics and vulnerability assessment outsourced to an external vendor. Handled selection and coordination.
Approach
- Rebuilt the infrastructure in the order evaluate → redesign → codify, starting from the issues in the existing setup
- Ran all design, operations, and hiring communication in English