Scaling a High-Growth Insurance Marketplace
When growth outpaces the platform, the team and the architecture have to change together.
Corvx helped a fast-growing insurance marketplace that had outgrown its own technology. The platform carried 1,500+ products and millions in premiums, but its PHP backend could not keep up. We deployed a dedicated engineering squad in two weeks and modernized the core services in Go-Lang, allowing the platform to scale 10x without becoming its own bottleneck.
The client operates one of Southeast Asia's largest digital insurance marketplaces, aggregating policies from 40+ underwriters. Its platform had grown from a scrappy MVP to a market leader processing over $30M in annual premiums. The PHP monolith was now limiting growth: page loads exceeded 6 seconds during campaigns, and the codebase had become nearly impossible to maintain.
What stood in the way
PHP Backend at Capacity
The monolithic PHP application couldn't handle concurrent traffic spikes during promotional campaigns, leading to cart abandonment rates exceeding 35% during peak periods.
Developer Velocity at a Standstill
A tangled codebase with minimal test coverage meant every new feature risked breaking existing functionality. The internal team was spending 60% of their time on bug fixes instead of building new products.
Urgent Need for Engineering Talent
The client needed 8 senior engineers immediately but couldn't hire fast enough in a competitive market. Every week of delay was costing them market share.
How we solved it
Rapid Team Deployment
We assembled and onboarded a dedicated 8-person engineering squad covering backend, frontend, QA, and DevOps within 14 days. The team joined the client's Agile ceremonies from day one.
Go-Lang Migration
We migrated the core comparison engine and checkout flow from PHP to Go-Lang, achieving 12x improvement in concurrent request handling. API response times dropped from 2.4 seconds to 180 milliseconds.
Automated QA Pipeline
Introduced a comprehensive test automation framework with 85% code coverage, reducing regression testing from 3 days to 4 hours per release cycle.
Within six months, the platform handled 10x its previous peak traffic without degradation. Cart abandonment during campaigns dropped from 35% to under 8%, and the development team shipped features 3x faster.
Built with
Backend
- Go-Lang
- gRPC
- PostgreSQL
- Redis
Frontend
- Next.js
- TypeScript
- TailwindCSS
Infrastructure
- AWS (ECS, Aurora, CloudFront)
- Docker
- GitHub Actions
QA & Monitoring
- Cypress
- k6 Load Testing
- Datadog
- PagerDuty
Parallel Build & Migrate
Week 1-2: Team Assembly
2 weeksTalent sourcing, vetting, and onboarding. Daily standups integrated with client's existing sprint cadence.
Month 1-2: Critical Path First
2 monthsMigrated the two highest-traffic, highest-revenue paths, the comparison engine and checkout, to Go-Lang behind a feature flag.
Month 3-4: Full Migration
2 monthsRemaining services migrated. Old PHP services decommissioned. Automated test coverage reached 85%.
Month 5-6: Optimization
2 monthsPerformance tuning, CDN optimization, and database query analysis. Prepared infrastructure for 10x growth.
What we brought to the table
Rapid Team Build
Dedicated engineering squad deployed in two weeks to maintain velocity.
Stack Modernization
Migration from monolithic PHP to scalable, concurrent Go-Lang architecture.
Quality Assurance
Comprehensive test automation ensuring zero regression during transition.
Agile Delivery with Embedded Teams
Our engineers joined the client's existing Agile ceremonies, shared Slack channels, and participated in code reviews. The result was one working team with a shared delivery rhythm.
Client quotes are published with permission. The project record above is the source for scope, method, and outcomes.Corvx project record
Related reading
Have a difficult system to work through?
Tell us what is slowing the work down and what you need the next version to do.
Start a conversation