Architecture & Scale
Regional trade and customs systems
Designing modular, API-based platforms for trade and customs processes in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, and leading the cross-border team that built them.
- Role
- Software Developer Analysts Supervisor · full-stack and architecture lead
- Period
- Nov 2020 — Aug 2024
Context
The USAID-funded Regional Trade Facilitation Project, implemented by Nathan Associates, supports governments in Central America in making cross-border trade faster and more predictable.
I led the full-stack and architectural design of the systems behind those processes across three countries, and supervised the developers who implemented them.
The challenge
Each country has its own institutions, regulations and existing systems, so a single monolithic product was not realistic. The platforms still had to share patterns so that a team could move between them.
Government technology teams had to adopt and eventually operate what we delivered, which made clarity, documentation and a gradual hand-over as important as the code.
Approach
Model the process before the screens
Trade procedures are long, multi-party workflows. We described them with BPM techniques first, which gave analysts, developers and government counterparts one shared picture of each step, owner and exception.
Modular, API-first services
Capabilities were exposed as APIs so that systems could be integrated with each other and with existing institutional software instead of replacing it. The stack was chosen per context, among Angular, React, Laravel, C# (ASP.NET), Django and PostgreSQL.
A cross-border team with common conventions
I led a team distributed across countries and agreed on repository structure, review practice and delivery rhythm so that work was comparable and handovers did not depend on any one person.
Adoption as a deliverable
I coordinated directly with government technology teams to plan rollout, training and support, because a system that is not adopted does not facilitate any trade.
Outcome
Working BPM and integration systems in three countries, built on modular platforms that can be extended rather than rewritten.
A team and a set of conventions that outlasted individual projects, and government counterparts who could take ownership of the systems.