Leading the move from outsourced development to an in-house engineering team.

QiH Group's development had been outsourced, and the move was to an in-house engineering team. We led that transition from November 2024 to June 2025, working on a legacy codebase.

Two things ran together. The legacy codebase needed modernising, and a growing in-house team needed to be able to build and ship it while that was happening.

Modernising a codebase while the team around it is still forming puts the working standard in place ahead of most of the people who will work to it. The delivery side of the job and the mentoring side pull on each other for the whole engagement.

We led the transition, modernised the legacy codebase and established DevOps best practices. We architected and built a Next.js application tuned for performance, which reached Core Web Vitals scores of 90 and above across every metric.

CI/CD pipelines went in, carrying automated testing and deployment strategies, with performance monitoring alongside them. Mentoring the growing team was part of the same role, covering development practice and the code quality and architecture standards the codebase would be held to.

Next.js and React with Tailwind on the front, Express behind it, and Google Cloud underneath: Cloud Run, Cloud Build, Cloud Storage and BigQuery, with Postgres for data. Terraform, Docker, GitHub Actions, Lighthouse CI and Sentry on the delivery and monitoring side. Jest, React Testing Library and Playwright covered the tests.

Our record names the transition, the modernisation, the pipelines and the mentoring, and one measurement: Core Web Vitals at 90 and above across every metric on the Next.js application. That is the only number on it.

It does not describe what QiH Group's platform does, how large the team became, how long the outsourcing arrangement had run, or what the codebase looked like when we arrived. Nothing here fills any of that in.