◆Enterprise SaaS
Sombra
From trainee to team lead on an enterprise SaaS platform
Role
Java Developer → Team Lead
Industry
Sales / E-commerce
Timeline
2.5 years
Type
Enterprise SaaS
Sombra was an enterprise SaaS platform supporting the digital transformation of a rapidly growing business. Over two and a half years I progressed through multiple levels of responsibility — starting in hands-on development and moving into architecture design, technical leadership and stakeholder engagement.
I led large-scale refactoring, designed the cloud migration strategy, and put in place the engineering practices — code reviews, documentation, standards — that kept quality high as the team doubled. The platform supported roughly 200% customer revenue growth while cloud modernization cut infrastructure costs by about 30%.
What I owned
- Advanced from Trainee Java Developer to Team Lead over 2.5 years — the first engineer promoted to Team Lead at the company, at the customer's direct request.
- Designed and implemented the cloud-migration strategy that modernized the platform's infrastructure onto Azure.
- Led large-scale refactoring initiatives that improved system maintainability and code quality.
- Architected scalable solutions using microservices and REST APIs, following SOLID and clean-architecture principles with Java, Spring Boot, Spring Cloud, Hibernate and JPA.
- Implemented Docker containerization and Jenkins CI/CD, and managed MS SQL Server and MySQL databases.
- Introduced code-review processes, technical documentation standards and SonarQube, and created architectural and knowledge-sharing resources.
- Hired, onboarded and mentored engineers, growing the team from 4 to 8 developers.
- Translated product vision into technical solutions with business stakeholders and presented the cloud-architecture strategy in internal knowledge-sharing sessions.