From empty repository to production

• Spring Boot
• Kubernetes
• Migration
• Leadership

Role: Founding engineer, then team lead

The problem

A large product still lived inside a monolith. It needed to move to independent services without stopping delivery, and without breaking customers.

What I did

• Bootstrapped three Spring Boot codebases from empty repositories: two product services, both taken to production, and a shared platform library.
• For the first service: a phased migration plan, the middleware framework (search, auth, schema migrations), and about 44% of its first-year commits. It reached general availability in December 2022, and I drove its later Spring Boot 3 and Java 17 upgrade.
• Wrote the shared library: security, caching with distributed locks, async context propagation and a query pipeline.
• Led the middleware layer from first customer demo to GA and 14+ releases, while the team grew from 5 to 13.

What I took from it

• Write the design document and the migration plan before the first commit.
• A shared library saves months, but only if it stays small and well tested.