Over the past 9 years at British Airways, my role has grown from Senior Frontend Engineer into Technical Design Lead responsibilities across key parts of the airline’s digital customer journey.
This case study is intentionally anonymised. It describes the type of work, decision-making, and delivery impact without exposing internal systems, sensitive implementation details, commercial data, or production information.
Context
The classic booking and payment journey is a complex customer flow with multiple frontend, backend, payment, CMS, and integration touchpoints. Changes need to be technically clear, well sliced, testable, and supportable without disrupting the customer experience.
Role
I look after technical design and delivery for this journey, aligning teams around practical architecture decisions and helping turn requirements into buildable technical work. I stay close to implementation, delivery planning, and production support rather than working only at a design-document level.
My value is often in the translation layer: taking a broad product or operational need, identifying the affected systems and teams, clarifying the decisions that need to be made, and producing a delivery path that engineers can implement and support.
Representative Work
- Shaped booking and payment journey changes involving frontend behaviour, backend contracts, secure payment steps, and operational support paths
- Supported technical design for payment flows involving concepts such as 3DS, tokenisation, authorization, orchestration, and third-party payment integration
- Helped align CMS-driven content changes with customer journey placement, eligibility logic, and maintainable delivery patterns
- Supported production issue triage by connecting customer/session context with logs, Splunk investigation, and cross-team debugging
- Prepared delivery-ready technical designs that clarified dependencies, assumptions, risks, test considerations, and handover needs
- Worked with delivery teams to slice larger initiatives into implementable items with fewer missed dependencies
Key Areas
- Creating end-to-end technical designs for booking, payment, content, and integration changes
- Aligning frontend and backend architecture across squads and delivery teams
- Shaping secure payment flows across 3DS, tokenisation, authorization, payment orchestration, and third-party payment integrations
- Supporting CMS-driven content such as co-brand card offers and contextual promotions
- Supporting technical readiness, item slicing, dependency tracking, and blocker management
- Investigating production issues using logs, Splunk, transaction IDs, MRNs, and session IDs
- Supporting vulnerability management, technical risk reviews, and governance activity
- Maintaining code quality, engineering standards, and long-term maintainability
- Supporting managed service transition through clear documentation and knowledge handover
Impact
This role helps teams move from uncertainty to a clear delivery path. The impact is mainly in better technical clarity, fewer missed dependencies, faster issue investigation, smoother support handover, and solutions that are easier to maintain once they reach production.
What This Demonstrates
- Senior frontend judgement grounded in real delivery and production support
- Ability to reason across frontend, backend, CMS, payment, security, and operational concerns
- Practical architecture communication for engineers, delivery teams, and stakeholders
- Careful handling of high-traffic customer journeys where reliability and supportability matter