Context
Alongside platform work, I was the technical side of enterprise customer engagements, first at Raw Engineering (building custom applications and API integrations on Contentstack, leading a team of 3) and then at Contentstack on pre-sales, migration and re-platforming programs.
What the work covered
- Pre-sales solutioning: turn business requirements into an architecture the customer can evaluate.
- Solution design and HLD: the target design, integration points and trade-offs, written down.
- Effort estimation and technical risk assessment, so commitments were grounded before delivery started.
- Delivery through go-live: custom applications, API integrations and migrations.
- Critical production escalations for named enterprise accounts, protecting client trust and retention.
Integration architecture
Most enterprise builds connect the content layer to the rest of the customer's stack. A common shape:
The design questions repeat across customers: which system owns each piece of data, how content and product data stay linked, and what happens when one side is unavailable.
Key takeaways
- The earlier the architecture risk surfaces (in pre-sales and estimates), the cheaper it is.
- Being the single technical point of contact means owning both the design and the conversation.
- Escalations are design feedback: the same issues showing up across accounts pointed to what the platform and our accelerators needed next.
Related: Enterprise CMS migration, Multi-tenancy.