EcoHope Digital Platform
From recycling operations to a connected digital platform.
Context & responsibility
I joined EcoHope as System Architect in October 2025 and was promoted to Head of Technology in June 2026. The work began at the greenfield stage: establishing the platform, cloud architecture and engineering practices alongside a lean team.
I owned technical direction and architecture, personally implemented the majority of the backend and internal web systems, and reviewed work from internal developers and an external mobile vendor.
A platform shaped by operations
The business combined recurring subscriptions with physical recycling services. Billing, service entitlements, bag delivery, collection orders and rewards needed explicit rules and ownership.
Conceptual capability map. These domains do not imply one separately deployed service per domain.
Key decisions & trade-offs
Separate billing from service entitlement
A subscription’s payment cycle and the customer’s right to book a collection are related business concepts with different rules. I modelled subscriptions and recycling entitlements explicitly so billing integrations could support the service model.
Match reward fulfillment to the asset
Rewards supported three models: EcoHope-managed inventory redeemed by merchant scanning; reusable client-provided codes, links or values; and pools of unique client-provided assets allocated on redemption. Making the fulfillment model explicit kept these operational differences visible.
Keep idle infrastructure cost proportionate
Serverless compute and managed infrastructure suited uncertain early demand across multiple environments. This reduced the need to provision compute for projected traffic, while database capacity, connection management and operational complexity still required deliberate design.
Protect production with infrastructure boundaries
AWS Organizations, production/non-production account separation, private networking and controlled cross-account access established boundaries beyond environment variables. The trade-off was additional IAM, networking and deployment coordination.
Delivery & outcomes
The platform covered customer, merchant, business, administrative, content and operational needs. A specific operational delivery was the Simple Merchant Recycle System, built in approximately two weeks to replace Excel-based factory records with electronic recycling transactions and reporting.
I combined architecture ownership with implementation, engineering standards, CI/CD, release processes and vendor review. The separate AI workspace case study explains how I structured development across the repositories.
Read the engineering workflow case study →