Cloud Infrastructure & Team Building

The Challenge

Purple Innovation — a publicly traded consumer products company — was running production systems across multiple cloud platforms with heavy dependency on external contractors. Engineering costs were high, institutional knowledge was walking out the door with every contract end, and the team needed to scale in-house capabilities to support the company’s growth trajectory.

The Approach

As Director of Software Engineering, we executed a multi-year transformation across three dimensions simultaneously:

Infrastructure consolidation:

• Migrated and consolidated production systems from multiple cloud providers to a unified AWS infrastructure
• Eliminated redundant services, optimized resource allocation, and established proper cost controls
• Built CI/CD pipelines and DevOps practices that the team could own and maintain

Team building from the ground up:

• Recruited and built in-house development teams, replacing numerous contractor agreements with full-time engineers who owned their systems
• Established engineering culture, code review practices, and career growth frameworks
• Built a fully remote engineering organization before remote work was the norm

Operational excellence:

• Implemented monitoring, alerting, and incident response processes
• Created technical documentation and runbooks that reduced onboarding time
• Fostered a culture of ownership where engineers took pride in uptime and performance

The Result

The transformation delivered millions of dollars in cost savings through eliminated contractor agreements and optimized cloud infrastructure. More importantly, it built a self-sustaining engineering organization capable of supporting the company’s continued growth.

The in-house teams now own their systems end-to-end, from development through production operations, with the technical foundation and engineering culture to scale with the business.