Tech lead on the agency team maintaining and extending Ordnance Survey's eCommerce platform.

Ordnance Survey is Britain's national mapping agency. Alongside the mapping data that government and industry licence from it, it sells to the public directly, and that retail side runs on the same kind of eCommerce infrastructure any large retailer depends on.

The build and maintenance work sat with an agency. We came in as tech lead in September 2022, running a team of developers across several of that agency's large eCommerce accounts. Ordnance Survey was one of the end clients the team served.

An agency estate is not one codebase. Accounts arrive with their own history, their own third-party contracts and their own idea of what urgent means, and the queue changes shape week to week. Holding a consistent standard across that is most of what the lead role is.

The bulk of the new work was integration. SAP on the commerce side, Nextopia and Fredhopper for search and merchandising, and a set of bespoke third-party APIs underneath. When something goes wrong in that layer it usually surfaces as a wrong price or a missing product rather than an error, so it needs somebody reading across the whole picture rather than the ticket in front of them.

We led the developers and set how the work was picked up, split between maintenance on what was already live and new features built on top of it. Our tech lead was in the code for the duration.

The platform was BigCommerce, with React and TypeScript in front of it and Node and Express services behind. Azure Functions and Service Bus carried the asynchronous work, which is where the third-party integrations mostly sat. Jest covered the tests.

Our record of this engagement names the role, the integrations and the technology, and it stops at account level. It does not itemise which piece of work went to which end client, so this page does not either.

There are no before-and-after figures for the engagement. Nothing is quoted here that we cannot evidence, which is why this page carries no headline number.