The Challenge
Fleetwise had built a compelling route-optimisation product on a scrappy monolithic architecture. It worked brilliantly at SME scale. But with two enterprise pilots on the horizon — each requiring SOC 2 compliance, SSO integration, and sub-100ms API response times — the engineering team knew the existing system would not survive contact with the real workload.
The founding CTO was brilliant at product thinking but hadn’t led a team through a technical transformation at this scale before. They needed an experienced hand alongside them, not a consultancy report.
What We Did
Technical audit. We spent the first three weeks conducting a thorough audit of the existing codebase, infrastructure, and engineering practices. We identified four critical bottlenecks and three architectural decisions that were quietly accumulating future costs.
Architecture roadmap. Working with the in-house team, we designed a phased migration from the monolith to a service-oriented architecture — scoped deliberately to be achievable without halting product development. No big-bang rewrites.
Hiring & team structure. We defined three new roles, wrote the job descriptions, sat on interview panels, and helped the founders make the two most important engineering hires of the company’s life — a senior backend engineer and a platform/SRE specialist.
Compliance readiness. We led the SOC 2 Type I readiness programme, coordinating with a specialist auditor and ensuring the engineering team had the processes and tooling in place to pass without disruption.
“Having someone who had been through this before — who knew which shortcuts would cost us later and which were genuinely fine — was worth more than any amount of documentation.”
— CTO, Fleetwise
The Outcome
Both enterprise pilots launched on schedule. Fleetwise passed their SOC 2 Type I audit on the first attempt. Average API response time dropped from 340ms to 68ms across the core endpoints.
The engagement ran for nine months. Azimuth holds a small equity stake and an ongoing board observer role.
Key Takeaways
- Architecture decisions made at Series A often determine what is possible at Series B — get them right the first time
- Phased migrations almost always outperform big-bang rewrites in a product company under commercial pressure
- The two or three key engineering hires at scale-up stage have a disproportionate impact on long-term outcomes