Multi-year delivery on an FCA-regulated insurance platform

The situation

A UK FCA-regulated insurance brokerage with a customer-facing portal at the centre of its business. Regulated context, real customers, and a platform that had to keep shipping while the business grew around it. I delivered on this platform for several years, across both the modern stack and the legacy systems it grew out of.

What I built

The core platform is a production Laravel application: 29 controllers, SQS FIFO queues for ordered background processing, Salesforce CRM sync, Excel import and export for operations teams, and CloudWatch logging throughout. Third-party integrations ran over webhooks and APIs, the kind where a partner's payload changes on a Friday and your error handling decides whether anyone notices.

Alongside it, I built and maintained the PHP/WordPress marketing platform, with custom CMS integrations, the AWS SDK, and Sentry error tracking. And because real organisations carry history, I worked across Zend 1, Zend 2, and Laravel codebases in the same organisation, keeping legacy systems healthy while the stack evolved underneath them.

Deployment ran on Docker: multi-stage builds for the PHP applications and multi-container development environments with MySQL, caching, and a reverse proxy, so every engineer worked against the same stack that ran in production. Production sat on AWS, with RDS, EC2 behind a load balancer, S3, and SQS, deployed through CI/CD.

The outcome

Years of continuous delivery in a regulated environment. Features shipped to a live customer portal week after week, integrations stayed up, and the legacy estate got smaller rather than scarier. The compliance constraints that come with FCA regulation, auditability, data handling, change control, were treated as engineering requirements and built into the pipeline rather than bolted on at review time.

This is the work most platforms actually need: steady, senior delivery on a system that's already in production, where the cost of a mistake is measured in customer trust rather than a failed demo.