Following the merger of Virgin Media and O2, the combined business needed to bring its customer-facing operational platforms together. The legacy O2 Care platform needed to be migrated into the wider VMo2 ecosystem without disrupting service to millions of customers.
Customer care is the front line of any telco. After the Virgin Media and O2 merger, the legacy O2 Care platform sat outside the new VMo2 estate and needed to be transitioned in without breaking the agents and processes that depend on it every day. The work demanded careful architectural planning, cross-team coordination and clear governance to keep both the engineering and architecture functions aligned.
I held the Technical Lead position on the transformation programme, directly responsible for the migration of the customer care platform from O2 into VMo2. I led a cross-functional team of six, three on backend and three on frontend, and worked closely with the VMo2 solution architecture team to define the target shape of the platform.
A large part of the role was governance. I authored the System Design documentation that backed the programme and presented to the Digital Architecture Board (DAB) for roadmap approval, turning the design intent into something engineers and architects across the wider business could rely on.
The platform was rebuilt around a Node.js / Fastify backend, prioritising throughput and predictable latency for high-volume care workflows. Infrastructure was provisioned on Google Kubernetes Engine and fully managed through Terraform, giving the team a single, reviewable source of truth for every environment change.
Day to day, that combination meant new features could move from design through DAB sign-off into production with confidence, on infrastructure that the team could reason about and reproduce.
The Care platform was successfully migrated into the VMo2 ecosystem, with a documented architecture, reproducible infrastructure and an engineering team set up to keep evolving it. The work demonstrated the value of pairing hands-on engineering leadership with the governance rigour that an estate of this size requires.