Carbonplace: Carbon Credit Trading Platform
Led the pivot from credit management to a live trading platform in three months, without dropping the existing product's roadmap.
Head of Engineering · Oct 2023 – Present
Overview
When I joined, Carbonplace ran a carbon credit management product, supported by two offshore engineering teams. Not long after, the business decided to pivot: instead of managing credits, the plan was to become a trading venue in its own right, built around a central limit order book (CLOB), with portfolio management and settlement around that trading core. Rather than build a CLOB from scratch, we licensed a cut of an existing trading platform's source code and contracted engineers from that vendor to help customize it for carbon markets. My job was to make that bet pay off technically.
My Role & Approach
I owned the initial prototype and the architecture review of the licensed codebase, deciding how it needed to change to fit our product and infrastructure. Early on, the vendor's proposed integration used an Electron-based widget architecture; I rejected it and pushed the design toward a leaner, more maintainable integration model instead. I also designed and built the layer around the platform that it depended on but didn't come with: REST APIs that pull reference data from market-data providers and feed it into the trading system, and I built the Playwright, Cucumber, and TypeScript test framework used to verify the trading platform's own features.
Underneath the technical work was a delivery problem: the two existing offshore teams kept the incumbent product moving while the new vendor team stood up the trading platform, with the two efforts kept organizationally separate so the business could validate the new direction without committing the existing roadmap to it. I was the one coordinating both.
Outcome
Both tracks delivered. The existing product's agreed milestones shipped on schedule, and the new trading platform went from a standing start in January 2024 to live in April 2024, three months later.
Tech Stack
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