Happy Money

Treating Infrastructure as Code to Automate, Accelerate and Stabilize Deployment

Treating Infrastructure as Code to Automate, Accelerate and Stabilize Deployment

Treating Infrastructure as Code to Automate, Accelerate and Stabilize Deployment

A laptop and smartphone displaying the Happy Money website with colorful graphics and the slogan "You only get happier from here."
A laptop and smartphone displaying the Happy Money website with colorful graphics and the slogan "You only get happier from here."
A laptop and smartphone displaying the Happy Money website with colorful graphics and the slogan "You only get happier from here."

Areas of Focus

  • Custom Software Development

  • Infrastructure Automation and DevOps

  • Best Practices and Methodologies

Happy Money is a Series D fintech startup focused on helping consumers achieve financial freedom and empowerment through custom lending and saving products.

Close-up of hands counting a spread of US dollar bills, symbolizing cash handling or financial transactions.
Close-up of hands counting a spread of US dollar bills, symbolizing cash handling or financial transactions.
Close-up of hands counting a spread of US dollar bills, symbolizing cash handling or financial transactions.

01

The Challenge

When Jeff Winner left his role as CTO at Goldman Sachs to become the CIO of Happy Money, he identified three core challenges to modernizing their software organization. 

The first was to move to cross-functional software teams, with each team owning their testing and release responsibilities. 

He also identified infrastructure automation, particularly around deployments, as the biggest blocker to scaling their engineering velocity. 

And finally, he knew that application teams needed to develop core engineering skills related to TDD, CI/CD, and deploying to AWS.

02

The Solution

Our team of three Software Developers and one Product Manager led this approach, and used our paired enablement approach to ramp up Happy Money’s DevOps team on Extreme Programming and Platform Engineering practices. We co-developed a codebase with that team that is 100% Infrastructure-as-Code.

We also led the cloud re-architecture efforts that enabled them to master deployment to their AWS environment and moved them from a manual release process to Trunk-based development on CI/CD. 

A graphic with three icons symbolizing a user-friendly lending process, happiness, and community-focused partners, set against a pale yellow background.
A graphic with three icons symbolizing a user-friendly lending process, happiness, and community-focused partners, set against a pale yellow background.
A graphic with three icons symbolizing a user-friendly lending process, happiness, and community-focused partners, set against a pale yellow background.

03

The Outcome

In less than six months we helped Happy Money transform their SDLC, work in a more cross-functional manner and modernize their path to production.

“Treating infrastructure as code means that we can spin it up and tear it down quickly and easily so we can respond to business needs faster. Artium showed us how we can build highly performant software that is easy to run and operate going forward.”

Leonard Hill - VP of Engineering, DevOps and Systems