Exiqtive (a.k.a. Clear Intent) is a workforce-management SaaS for distributed operations teams — accounts, employees, organisational structure, badges and checkpoints, performance scorecards, and a readiness signal that cascades bottom-up through the org tree. Multi-tenant, OAuth2-authenticated, real-time over WebSocket, with forty-two notification workflows wiring it to the people who care.
We've held the CTO chair since the project began in 2023. That meant architecting all three layers at once — backend on Django + DRF + Celery + Channels, frontend on React with a Storybook-anchored design system, infrastructure on Terraform-managed AWS — at first single-handedly, then as the place a growing team of engineers plugged into.
The shape we chose was deliberate. A service layer, not view-fat views. Async cascades through Celery with `transaction.on_commit` so the next step only runs after the database has agreed. Multi-tenant isolation enforced at the row level by Postgres RLS, not just by the application layer. OAuth2 scopes gating the endpoints. A parallel v1 / v2 API surface so paying customers never lose a contract. Tests fast enough to run on every push — two thousand two hundred of them, in two and a half minutes.
Two and a half years in, the architectural shape still holds. A dedicated DevOps engineer eventually took over the day-to-day of the infrastructure we set up; the architecture, the boundaries between apps, the notification taxonomy, the test investments — all still ours to evolve.