All workRoyal Voluntary Service · Public sector · Charity · 2025
A national volunteering platform, built in eight months
175,000 peak concurrent users during national ITV advertising
Next.js 15TypeScriptNestJSPostgreSQLTurborepoKubernetesGitHub ActionsVector search
The problem
The UK's national volunteering charity needed a platform that could match people to volunteering opportunities across the country — and it needed to be live before a national television campaign that would drive an unknown, enormous, and entirely unrepeatable traffic spike.
The approach
- 01Architected the platform from an empty repository, owning the frontend estate: Next.js 15, React, strict TypeScript, Tailwind, Turborepo and pnpm workspaces.
- 02Built shared internal packages — components, API clients, types, hooks, feature flags, constants — adopted across every team, so five engineers could move without colliding.
- 03Contributed backend services in NestJS and PostgreSQL, including the location and mapping services that underpin opportunity search.
- 04Integrated ML pipelines for opportunity summarisation and vector-based semantic search in production.
- 05Designed CI/CD on GitHub Actions and Docker, and partnered with DevOps on autoscaling Kubernetes infrastructure.
- 06Load tested beyond one million concurrent users, because the cost of being wrong on live national television is not recoverable.
The outcome
Launched on time, eight months from the first commit, beyond the original scope.
Held 175,000 peak concurrent users during the ITV campaign.
Engineering standards for architecture, styling, testing, accessibility and code quality adopted across the organisation.