Engineering Change Part 3: Building bespoke technology solutions
This five-part series explores how composable architecture, emerging technologies, and a collaborative engineering culture drive meaningful transformation. It’s a practical guide for organisations looking to modernise legacy systems, unlock agility, and build future-ready digital solutions.
This is part three: In it, Declan covers how Inviqa builds bespoke applications, cloud-native platforms, and secure authentication systems.
In a snapshot:
- Bespoke solutions are built with modern frameworks and CI/CD pipelines
- Infrastructure-as-code ensures scalable, repeatable environments
- Cloud-agnostic deployment with AWS, Azure, or GCP
- Secure user access via OAuth, SSO, and RBAC is baked in from the start
You can read part one by clicking here, and part two by clicking here.
How Inviqa builds bespoke technology solutions
Despite the capabilities of today’s technology platforms, not every business challenge fits neatly into a product category or off-the-shelf solution. This is where bespoke software development - designing and building custom web, mobile and business applications tailored exactly to your requirements – comes into play.
We have deep experience in developing the kinds of websites and applications people rely on every day. On the front end, we use modern frameworks such as React, Angular, or Vue, with Next.js (and TypeScript) as our go-to solution for most web projects. Next.js gives us the best of both worlds: the performance and SEO benefits of server-side rendering or static site generation, and a fantastic developer experience with a rich ecosystem. The result is fast, accessible, and engaging web applications built to a high standard.
For the back end, we choose technology based on the needs of the project. Often, we build services using Node.js/TypeScript, which allows us to share code and data models between the front-end and back-end seamlessly. In cases where performance, concurrency, or low-level control is paramount - especially in a microservices or high-traffic scenario - we might favour Golang for its speed and simplicity. We’re adept at structuring backend logic into clean APIs (REST or GraphQL) that can be consumed by front-ends or other services.
Mobile development as part of bespoke services
Mobile development is also a part of our bespoke offerings. We develop native mobile apps using Swift (for iOS) and Kotlin (for Android) when a fully native experience is required. We also deliver cross-platform solutions using frameworks like React Native or Flutter when those are a better fit for project timeline or budget. In all cases, we aim to deliver mobile apps that feel fully native to the platform and provide smooth, responsive user experiences.
Crucially, our bespoke solutions are built with the same operational excellence as any other project: services are packaged into Docker containers and, by default, deployed on cloud infrastructure (typically AWS). We use modern CI/CD pipelines to build, test, and deploy these applications continuously, ensuring that even custom-built software is shipped with reliability and scalability in mind.
If your challenge is something genuinely new or specific to your business, we have the skills and practices to design a solution from scratch - and integrate it with your existing systems - in a maintainable, future-proof way.
The power behind our platform engineering capabilities
Behind every dependable digital product is a well-structured platform. At Inviqa, we take a cloud-native, infrastructure-as-code approach to building secure, repeatable environments that scale with your needs.
Infrastructure is provisioned and managed using code-first tools like Terraform, AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK), or CloudFormation, enabling consistent and auditable environments across development, staging, and production. This declarative approach means your infrastructure (servers, networks, databases, etc.) is version-controlled and reproducible at any time - no more mysterious “works on my machine” issues or drift between environments.
As with our service offerings, our orchestration strategy is built on containers. We use Docker to package applications, and our default runtime environment is Amazon Web Services - often deploying on AWS Elastic Container Service (ECS) with Fargate. This setup provides a serverless container infrastructure where AWS handles the heavy lifting of server management and scaling, so we can focus on delivering features. We have a close relationship with AWS and a great deal of experience leveraging its services. That said, if a project demands Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud Platform, we’re comfortable there too - truly cloud-agnostic in our hosting approach. In scenarios requiring advanced orchestration (multi-region deployments, custom scheduling, service mesh architectures), we can use Kubernetes - but we reach for that added complexity only when it’s justified by the requirements.
Our engineers understand cloud networking and security deeply. We know how to carve up a VPC, design private subnets, and configure networking rules so that your systems are isolated and secure. We wire up logs, metrics, and traces so we can see exactly what’s happening in production and quickly diagnose issues.
Observability is a first-class concern: we implement robust monitoring and alerting using tools such as Amazon CloudWatch, Datadog, Prometheus/Grafana, or other APM solutions as appropriate. This means not only do we keep your systems up and running, but we also have the data to optimise performance and plan capacity.
Our platform engineering practices follow established DevOps principles, enabling fast, safe, and automated delivery. We work closely with development teams to embed Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines from the beginning of a project. Every code change goes through automated tests and security scans, and deployments are push-button or better. Infrastructure changes are rolled out with the same care as application code.
The outcome is a development lifecycle where new features move from a developer’s laptop to the cloud efficiently and reliably, with minimal friction and maximum confidence.
Implementing user authentication & authorisation tools
Managing user identity and permissions has become a foundational aspect of almost every software project. Implementing authentication and authorisation requires robust, industry-proven standards and services, so that users can securely access what they need and nothing more.
Our solutions typically employ open standards like OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect (OIDC), and SAML for identity flows. We often integrate with established identity providers such as Auth0, AWS Cognito, or enterprise Single Sign-On systems, depending on what best fits the context. This means your users can log in seamlessly and securely - whether via social login, SSO, or traditional accounts - and you benefit from tried-and-tested identity frameworks rather than rolling your own.
We also design role-based access control (RBAC) into applications from the start. This includes defining user roles and permissions and ensuring that every API endpoint or front-end feature checks the user’s authority before allowing access.
We’re strong advocates of features like multi-factor authentication (MFA) that can be enabled to add extra security for sensitive actions and implement auditing where needed - for example, keeping a secure log of who accessed what, which is often important for compliance.
By using standards and well-supported identity platforms, this approach to authentication and authorisation not only keeps your system secure but also simplifies the developer experience (with libraries and services to handle the heavy lifting) and improves user experience (with features like single sign-on and one-click logins).
So that’s a look at how we tackle bespoke development, platform engineering, and user authentication and authorisation. Whether it’s building something completely custom, setting up cloud infrastructure that scales, or making sure users can log in securely, our focus is always on creating reliable, future-ready solutions that just work.
Next up, Declan dives into how it’s all pulled together, exploring integration, APIs, AI, and security. He’ll show how these elements help systems talk to each other, make smarter decisions, and stay protected in an increasingly complex digital world.
