The Context
Endava is a global technology consultancy that places engineers with major enterprise clients. Over nearly 3 years there, I rotated across projects for Deutsche Telekom, NETS (Scandinavian payments infrastructure), and eLife Sciences (UK academic publishing) — all full-stack JavaScript.
This was the period that raised my bar. Working across telecoms, payments, and academic publishing forced me to adapt fast, learn new domains quickly, and deliver consistently regardless of the business context. It set the standard for the freelance and enterprise work I did afterward.
What I Built
Scientific Paper Processing
eLife Sciences (UK)
Built a document conversion system with Node.js, AWS S3, and Lambda that processed 2,000+ scientific papers daily. The React frontend handled paper submission, tracking, and collaborative workflows — optimized for rendering large document collections without choking the browser.
E-Commerce Checkout System
NETS Scandinavia
Created a checkout system with React and TypeScript supporting multiple payment methods including Klarna and traditional cards. In payments, reliability isn't a nice-to-have — every edge case in the flow is someone's money. This is where my attention to payment-critical code started.
Impact Across Clients
What I Took Away
Agency work forces you to get productive fast in unfamiliar codebases and domains. After rotating through telecoms, payments, and academic publishing in under 3 years, I stopped being intimidated by new contexts. The pattern is always the same: understand the domain, find the real constraints, ship.
This is also where I started mentoring — guiding 2 junior developers through React best practices and Node.js architecture. Teaching others forced me to articulate what I knew and identify gaps in my own understanding. It made me a better engineer, not just a more senior one.