At Azupay, we build software with a clear purpose: to deliver secure, reliable, and intuitive digital payment solutions that our customers can depend on every day. Behind that commitment is a delivery culture built on strong engineering principles, modern cloud architecture, and a relentless focus on continuous improvement. Our engineering team, led by CTO Andrew Seymour, works in a weekly delivery cadence with strong Agile fundamentals, continuous testing, and a cloud-native, serverless architecture built on AWS. We do not just ship features; we deliver value, fast, and with confidence. Here is a look at how we do it.
Delivering at a Weekly Cadence, Powered by Pragmatic Agile
We run our software development in weekly cycles, with production deployments happening on a regular and predictable cadence. Our approach to Agile is pragmatic and outcome oriented, with a strong focus on tight feedback loops, lightweight planning, and constant iteration. This enables us to respond quickly to business needs and user feedback. Each release is small by design, which helps us reduce risk, identify issues early, and maintain momentum without waiting for a major release milestone. This rhythm allows us to move quickly while keeping quality and reliability at the heart of everything we do.
Practicing Extreme Programming Every Day
At the core of our engineering culture are several practices inspired by Extreme Programming, which we use as part of our everyday routine. One of the most impactful is pair programming. Every day, we work in pairs, either in person or remotely, writing code together, reviewing it in real time, and sharing ownership of both the problems and the solutions. This collaborative approach strengthens quality, builds shared understanding, and creates a strong sense of team ownership over the codebase.
Another cornerstone is test driven development, which we use extensively to guide our design and implementation. Writing tests first helps us clarify intent, catch errors before they occur, and structure our code in a way that is both maintainable and resilient to change. Testing is not something we reserve for the end of the sprint. It is an integral part of how we think, design, and refactor.
Testing Across the Stack, Built into the Pipeline
Quality assurance at Azupay is not treated as a separate phase. It is continuous, automated, and deeply integrated into our delivery lifecycle. We use a layered approach to testing. Unit tests ensure correctness at the code level. Integration tests confirm that services interact as expected. End to end tests validate real world workflows across our system.
These tests are executed automatically as part of our CI pipeline, triggered by every commit, and provide fast feedback to developers. This prevents regressions and maintains high confidence in the quality of our software.
While automation is central, we also have a dedicated QA team that focuses on areas that are harder to automate, such as complex edge cases and user interface interactions. Exploratory testing helps us uncover subtle issues that might slip through automation, and QA feedback directly informs improvements in both test coverage and test strategy.
A Cloud Native, Event Driven Architecture
From the beginning, we have built our platform to be cloud native, leveraging AWS to achieve scalability, resilience, and agility. Our architecture is event driven and serverless, using AWS Lambda for compute, Node.js for service logic, and DynamoDB for low latency, persistent storage. Services are decoupled through asynchronous messaging, which allows them to operate and scale independently without being tightly bound to one another.
All infrastructure is defined using code, managed through AWS CDK and CloudFormation. This ensures that our environments are reproducible, version controlled, and consistent across development, testing, and production. Manual changes are eliminated, which significantly reduces operational risk and complexity.
CI/CD and the Automation of Everything
Our entire delivery lifecycle is automated using GitLab CI/CD, which enables us to deliver frequently and confidently. Each code commit triggers a series of automated workflows that run tests, execute static and dynamic security scans, and check for vulnerabilities in our dependencies. Once a change successfully passes through all stages, it is released to production during our weekly deployment window.
We follow a consistent release cadence each week, which allows us to batch features and fixes into well structured, predictable updates. This cadence strikes the right balance between agility and control, giving our teams time to test thoroughly and our stakeholders visibility into what is coming next.
Security as a First Class Citizen
Security is deeply embedded in how we build software at Azupay. We follow DevSecOps principles that shift security to the earliest stages of development. Every commit is automatically scanned for vulnerabilities, secret exposure, and potential misconfigurations. GitLab performs static analysis, dynamic analysis, and dependency scanning by default, making security checks a natural part of our CI/CD pipeline.
We operate in alignment with leading standards, including SOC 2, ISO 27001, and NIST 2.0, not simply to meet regulatory requirements, but to build trust and robustness into everything we deliver. Security is not a separate concern or the responsibility of a different team. It is owned collectively and continuously by every engineer on our team.
A Lean Team with Strong Ownership
Our engineering team is small and focused, with eight full stack engineers supported by a delivery manager and our QA team. Despite our size, we deliver a broad scope of work with high velocity because each engineer is empowered to design, build, deploy, and maintain the systems they work on. There is no handoff culture here. Engineers own their code from idea to implementation and into production.
This model fosters deep understanding, reduces context switching, and speeds up decision making. It also creates a healthy feedback loop where learnings from production feed directly into how we plan, design, and write code. We place a strong emphasis on infrastructure automation, code quality, and team learning because we know these investments compound over time.
Final Thoughts
In a fast moving sector like fintech, agility, trust, and security are essential. At Azupay, we have built an engineering culture that reflects those priorities. Our combination of Agile delivery, cloud native architecture, test automation, and continuous deployment allows us to move quickly without compromising on quality or control. We do not just aim to deliver software. We aim to deliver software that lasts, scales, and earns trust.
If this sounds like a way of working that resonates with you, feel free to reach out [email protected]
We are always keen to connect with people who are passionate about building great software and doing it the right way.
