Nokia

Challenge

Nokia’s platform engineering team was maintaining a legacy telecom infrastructure that had served the business well for years but was reaching its architectural limits. Build times were slow, deployments were risky, and the monolithic architecture made it difficult to develop new capabilities without destabilizing existing ones.

Simultaneously, the team needed to grow significantly to support Nokia’s next-generation platform ambitions — but scaling a team while migrating an architecture is one of the hardest problems in engineering leadership.

Approach

The engagement combined architecture modernization with organizational scaling, treating them as interdependent rather than sequential challenges.

Architecture review and decomposition: Conducted a thorough architecture review identifying the highest-leverage decomposition points. Rather than a full rewrite, we identified services that could be extracted incrementally, starting with the components that created the most coupling and the longest build times.

Cloud migration strategy: Designed a migration path that prioritized workloads by risk and business value. Critical systems migrated first with extensive testing and rollback plans. Non-critical systems followed using patterns established by the initial migrations.

Team scaling: Developed a hiring and onboarding strategy aligned with the new architecture. New team members were assigned to new services where they could be productive quickly, rather than being thrown into the legacy codebase. This protected both the new hires’ ramp time and the existing team’s delivery commitments.

Outcomes

• Platform build times dramatically reduced through service decomposition and parallel build pipelines
• Cloud migration completed for critical workloads with zero unplanned downtime
• Engineering team scaled significantly while maintaining — and in some areas improving — delivery velocity
• New architecture enabled feature development cycles that were previously impossible on the monolithic platform

Technologies Used

Cloud infrastructure (multi-cloud), Kubernetes, microservices architecture, CI/CD modernization, telecom-specific protocols and standards