Six years inside a US mortgage-tech platform: mobile, web and the tooling underneath
The situation
Insellerate sells a customer relationship and engagement platform to lenders, and describes it as one continuously updated customer record across products, channels and teams. Loan officers work leads and pipelines on it all day, borrowers meet parts of it from the outside, and the company's own staff run support on top of it. I joined in June 2020 and have been building on it since.
What made it hard
Lending is regulated, so messaging, disclosures and data handling are not places to improvise. The team is small and ships continuously, which rules out long-lived branches and big-bang releases. Three audiences share the same platform and none of them can be given a worse experience to suit another.
My part in it
Full-stack engineer and designer. I architected, designed and built several of the platform's applications end to end, rather than picking up tickets against someone else's design. Other engineers own other parts of the platform; product direction and compliance requirements come from the company. The interface design on the apps I own is mine.
What I built, and why
The mobile app, iOS and Android
React Native from one codebase, with Firebase and Azure behind push notifications, analytics and cloud services. Insellerate launched it in 2020 as a first-of-its-kind mobile app for mortgage professionals, and describes it as mobile lead management and distribution, marketing automation, loan origination system (LOS) integration, in-app calling and SMS, and pipeline management. It has been on both stores since launch, with regular releases ever since, so most of the work has been sustained delivery: performance, platform upgrades and interface changes that survive a release every few weeks.
Applications owned end to end
A presentation tool loan officers use to walk borrowers through loan options; an application that handles inbound lead intake; and an in-product help and support module used by customers and the internal team. React front ends on PostgreSQL. For each one I did the system design, the interface design and the build, which is the part that interests me: the architecture and the screen stop being two people's opinions and become one decision.
Shared packages instead of copies
Authentication and feedback were being solved separately in each app, so I pulled them into shared packages the platform's applications consume. One place to fix a bug, one behaviour for users, and new apps start with the parts that are easy to get subtly wrong already settled.
Engineering standards as code
I maintain a plugin for our AI coding tooling that encodes the team's conventions and review expectations, so assisted changes arrive in the house style instead of a plausible-looking variant of it. It is the same idea as a linter: put the standard where the work happens rather than in a document people read once.
Where it stands
Six years on the same platform, which now takes in 450,000+ new borrower applications a month. The app is live on both stores and still shipping; the applications I own are in daily use by lender staff, borrowers and Insellerate's own team; and the shared packages and standards plugin are now how new work starts.