PE-Backed SaaS Platform
Platform re-architecture enabled 10x scale and cut deployment time from days to minutes
A PE-backed B2B SaaS company was hitting the ceiling on its monolithic platform — deployments took days, scaling required manual intervention, and engineering velocity had stalled. We re-architected the platform for scale while keeping the business running.
The Challenge
The company had grown rapidly through acquisition, bolting three separate products onto a single monolithic codebase that was originally designed for a fraction of its current load. Deployments required a weekend maintenance window, any failure in one product affected all three, and the engineering team spent more time on operational firefighting than building features. The PE sponsor's growth thesis depended on the platform supporting 10x the current customer base within 18 months — a target the existing architecture could not support.
Our Approach
We conducted a thorough assessment of the platform, identifying the critical bottlenecks: a shared database that created contention across all three products, a deployment process that required manual coordination across six teams, and no automated testing or monitoring to speak of.
Rather than a risky big-bang rewrite, we used the strangler fig pattern to incrementally extract the highest-contention services into independently deployable components. We started with the billing and usage tracking system — the primary source of database contention — and moved it to its own service with a dedicated data store.
In parallel, we built an internal developer platform that standardized CI/CD, monitoring, and deployment across all teams. We containerized the application, implemented infrastructure as code, and established automated testing gates that gave the team confidence to deploy without weekend maintenance windows.
Over six months, we extracted three more critical services, established clear API contracts between components, and implemented horizontal auto-scaling for the customer-facing tiers.
The Results
Deployment time reduced from 2-3 days to under 15 minutes — with automated rollback capability if issues are detected.
99.95% uptime achieved — up from 99.2%, eliminating the monthly outages that were driving customer churn.
10x headroom for growth — the re-architected platform auto-scales horizontally, supporting the PE sponsor's growth thesis without further re-architecture.
3x increase in deployment frequency — teams now deploy independently multiple times per week instead of coordinating monthly releases.
40% reduction in engineering time spent on operations — freeing capacity for feature development that drives revenue growth.
Platform supports M&A integration — the modular architecture and standardized platform make it significantly easier to integrate future acquisitions.
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