Atmos Financial

The Challenge

Atmos Financial faced significant challenges in expanding from consumer-focused services to commercial banking. The project required building a robust platform that could handle complex commercial account structures, ensure compliance with strict financial regulations, maintain data integrity across multiple systems, and scale to support growing transaction volumes - all while maintaining the seamless user experience that differentiated Atmos in the market.

A significant technical challenge was the existing approach to critical financial operations like interest payments. These were being executed as manual, local batch processes by individual engineers - introducing significant risk of human error, payment discrepancies, and compliance issues. The system lacked proper monitoring, error recovery, and auditability needed for a regulated financial institution.

My Role

As Technical Lead, I was responsible for:

• Leading the rollout of the commercial deposits product
• Managing integrations with third-party providers
• Designing, building, and maintaining a robust Elasticsearch cluster
• Implementing Know Your Business (KYB) compliance processes
• Contributing to the development of their commercial lending product
• Restructuring the jobs and worker architecture

Technical Approach

The project was built on a Node.js with React stack, where I collaborated with a small team of 3-4 engineers. Key technical components included:

• Elasticsearch cluster for handling daily-balance and transaction data
• Integration with Equifax for KYB compliance
• Application process implementation for commercial banking
• Scalable jobs and worker architecture

Job Architecture Transformation

A major challenge I tackled was transforming Atmos Financial's critical financial processing jobs from error-prone manual processes to automated, reliable systems. When I joined, engineers were running long-running batch jobs locally on their machines - a practice that created significant operational risk.

Monthly interest payments were particularly problematic - executed as one massive job where failures required manual CSV tracking and complex reprocessing, leading to potential duplicate payments and accounting errors. I architected and implemented a complete overhaul of this system:

• Designed and built a distributed job architecture that decomposed monolithic processes into individual, atomic operations
• Implemented a scheduler that automatically initiated individual jobs for each account's interest payment
• Created a rate-limited job queue system that prevented API throttling while maintaining processing efficiency
• Engineered idempotency into every job, ensuring operations could be safely retried without duplicate payments
• Built comprehensive monitoring, logging, and error handling to provide visibility into processing status

This transformation eliminated manual intervention, reduced payment processing errors to near-zero, and created a pattern that the engineering team adopted across multiple critical financial processes. The new architecture improved both reliability and auditability, crucial factors for a financial institution, while reducing operational risk.

Data Management

A critical challenge was managing the exponential growth of financial transaction data while maintaining sub-second query performance. I designed and implemented a custom Elasticsearch solution with time-based indices and optimized mappings that efficiently scaled to handle over 1 million daily-balance and transaction records. This architecture reduced average query times from 3-5 seconds to under 200ms, enabling real-time financial analytics and reporting capabilities essential for reatil and commercial banking operations.

Compliance and Security

Financial applications require strict adherence to regulatory requirements, with zero tolerance for compliance failures. I architected a robust solution that integrated with Equifax's commercial verification systems and implemented a comprehensive, automated Know Your Business (KYB) workflow. This system incorporated multi-layered verification checks, audit logging, and exception handling that achieved 100% compliance with federal banking regulations while reducing application processing time from days to hours.

Team Collaboration

As Technical Lead, I established a collaborative engineering culture focused on quality and knowledge sharing. I implemented code review standards, pair programming sessions, and bi-weekly architecture discussions that accelerated the professional growth of team members. As Technical Lead, I established a collaborative engineering culture focused on quality and knowledge sharing. I implemented code review standards, pair programming sessions, and bi-weekly architecture discussions that accelerated the professional growth of team members. Under my leadership, we delivered all project milestones on schedule while maintaining code quality metrics above company standards. This collaborative approach ensured we built a robust, compliant product that exceeded Atmos Financial's business objectives and positioned them for successful expansion into the commercial banking sector.This collaborative approach ensured we built a robust, compliant product that exceeded Atmos Financial's business objectives and positioned them for successful expansion into the commercial banking sector.