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Leading compliance and identity verification

Two years leading the team behind government checks on a KYC platform, as it expanded across Latin America.

org
MetaMap
role
Development team lead
period
2020 – 2021
kind
employment
TypeScriptNode.jsMongoDB

## tl;dr

MetaMap's KYC platform verified people in several steps, and government checks were among the hardest: each country's services had their own APIs, data formats and reliability problems. I led a team of six and built a framework and a playbook that let any developer add a new check the same way, so the team could integrate checks in parallel. The platform grew to about 80 country-specific checks across Latin America.

## context

MetaMap ran a KYC platform that verified people through several steps, including government and background checks. A government check queries an official service, and every country’s service differs in API, authentication, data format and documentation. Many are also unstable. The business needed to expand quickly across Latin America, adding several checks per country. Each check had to be built quickly without becoming a one-off that was hard to review and support.

## my-role

  • Led a team of six: front-end, back-end and full-stack developers and QA.
  • Built a framework for government checks. Each check takes a person’s details as input and returns that check’s result, using the same structure underneath.
  • Wrote a playbook with checklists, so any developer who had researched a government service could integrate it the same way. The result was easy to review.
  • Built resilience for unstable government services: retries, fallbacks, temporarily suspending a failing service, and dead-letter-style processing.
  • Led delivery of customizable watchlist screening, so customers could keep their own compliance datasets.
  • Owned architecture, feature design, code reviews, hiring and planning for the team.

## outcome

  • About 80 country-specific government checks across Latin America, many integrated in parallel.
  • Every new check followed the same playbook and framework, so checks were faster to build and easier to review.