Acting CTO for a viral marketing SaaS at a million hits a day

Context

Upviral is a viral marketing platform where users run contests and referral campaigns. I held the acting CTO role from 2019 to 2024 — an engagement through my company rather than a direct employment — which meant technical direction and executive partnership with the founders rather than delivery management alone.

Leadership & decisions

Event-driven, deliberately. Campaign traffic is spiky by nature: a referral campaign can go from nothing to very large in hours. I directed the architecture towards event-driven microservices on AWS Lambda and DynamoDB so that cost tracked usage instead of peak provisioning.

AI where it removed a blank page, not everywhere. When we introduced OpenAI-backed campaign generation, the decision I cared about was scope: generating campaign copy and structure for a user staring at an empty form is genuinely valuable, whereas letting a model make targeting decisions was risk without a matching return. We shipped the first.

Outcome

A platform sustaining over a million daily hits on an architecture that scales with demand, with AI-assisted campaign creation as a native part of the product.