Bill RushHead of Engineering and Global Operations (CTO Role)
Jan. 2022 - Jul. 2024Auckland, New ZealandBilrush is a disruptive startup in the Corporate Billing, Payments, and Subscriptions Vertical Markets. It is a multi-tenanted platform that brings Billing, Payments, and Subscriptions into the realm of modern Apps. Billrush has a Particular Focus on Open Banking Initiatives, we see that as the future and are building in the capability natively As The Head of Global Engineering and Operations, my position encompassed all facets of CTO, Systems Architect and Solutions Architect Roles in a cross-functional team where we looked at the platform as a whole and designed it from the ground up to be robust, stable, expandable and very importantly, Cloud Vendor Agnostic. The system could be deployed on any Cloud Provider as well as Bare Metal Servers. Built on a Kubernetes (1.30) infrastructure, using fully declarative deployment processes, ( some we wrote ourselves ), the platform is scalable and robust, using the latest, modern tech, including: Kubernetes, RabbitMq, PostgreSQL, TimeseriesDB, S3 Storage, Vault, Verdaccio, Ubuntu 24.3 LTS, teleport, Grafana, loki, Mimir, Prometheus, Keycloak, Infiosical, kubeshark, metallb, odoo, openebs, OpenTelemetry, CertManager, secrets replication, camel-k, Hyperswitch to name a few ... Front ends were written in the latest Angular, targeted as an in-cluster pod deployment, or deployed globally via Cloudflare. We paid particular attention to the operational, deployment, reporting and monitoring aspects of the platform, Our view is that building an MVP first without the proper tooling and support infrastructure in place was like building a house on a deck of cards. We found early on that this approach produced many dividends in the development and operational management aspects of the platform and permitted us to be confident of our platform and capabilities when the time came for Go-Live. AN additional benefit was the reduced level of staffing required to manage the system, as we focused on automation as a priorirty form Day One