Tech lead on customer-facing services for a UK water utility
A UK water utility serving millions of customers needed senior technical leadership across the customer-facing services stack: account self-service, the Salesforce-anchored sales journey, and the supporting Azure infrastructure. We led the architecture and delivery decisions on a critical-infrastructure platform where every change had to balance customer experience against the operational realities of a regulated utility.
The brief
A national UK water company running customer-facing digital services needed a tech lead on a programme of work spanning account self-service, the Salesforce-integrated sales journey, and the cloud platform underneath. The challenge was the combination: a regulated-utility customer base, a Salesforce integration point that sat between marketing intent and operational reality, and an Azure platform that had to be modernised without disrupting live services to millions of customers.
The brief explicitly required someone who could make architectural decisions stick across multiple workstreams, hold a confident technical position with senior stakeholders, and ship into production without breaking the parts that already worked.
The scope
The work spanned three connected areas.
Customer-facing services architecture. Authentication and account management via Azure B2C, account self-service journeys on React, and the supporting .NET Core APIs. The decisions here had to consider both the typical broadband-equipped customer and the customer reaching the service from a low-end mobile device.
Salesforce integration design. A shopping-cart-style flow that connected marketing campaigns to Salesforce-managed sales journeys, with downstream effects on billing and operational systems. The integration design had to handle the realities of a regulated utility: every customer-state change has compliance, audit and customer-communication implications.
Platform engineering decisions. Azure infrastructure choices, Kubernetes workload deployment, SQL Server data layer decisions. The pattern: pick the technology that fits the regulated-utility constraint set, not the technology that is most fashionable.
The outcome
- Architectural decisions taken and held across customer-facing services, Salesforce integration and the Azure platform.
- Self-service customer journeys delivered against the regulated-utility constraint set.
- Salesforce shopping-cart-style sales flow designed to handle the real customer state transitions, not the demo path.
- Engagement closed cleanly to handover, leaving the in-house team with the architectural reasoning written down.
What we learned, applied across our other work
Regulated-sector architecture is not the same as commercial architecture. The constraint set is different: every change has audit and customer-communication implications that an unregulated commercial team never has to think about. Architecture decisions that ignore this fail at the first compliance review.
Salesforce integration points are where business reality meets technical reality. The most common failure pattern is a design that assumes the demo customer journey is the real one. Real customers cancel, change minds, hit edge cases, and the integration has to handle all of it.
The right Azure decision is rarely the trendy Azure decision. Regulated-utility workloads benefit from boring infrastructure choices that age well.
Tech stack
Front end
Back end
Platform
Methodology
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