Case study
Driving DevOps Culture and Cross-Team Collaboration at LiveOak Bank
Problem
Development teams operated in silos with inconsistent infrastructure practices and CI/CD workflows, leading to duplicated work, slower delivery, and limited cross-team knowledge sharing.
Solution
Unified infrastructure standards with Terraform, rebuilt GitLab pipelines for modularity and trunk-based development, and facilitated workshops to align engineering practices across teams.
Result
Increased delivery speed by <strong>50%</strong>, cut onboarding time for new developers by <strong>40%</strong>, and fostered a shared DevOps culture across the engineering organization.
When I joined LiveOak Bank in 2023 as Vice President of Software Engineering (Senior Development Operations Engineer), the organization’s DevOps landscape was functional but fragmented. Teams maintained their own AWS CloudFormation templates, had varying CI/CD approaches, and rarely shared tooling improvements with one another.
This siloed approach slowed delivery, created duplicated effort, and reduced the overall efficiency of the engineering organization. Leadership wanted a shift toward a shared DevOps culture — one where teams could collaborate on common patterns, re-use infrastructure modules, and reduce operational friction.
Strategic Actions
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Infrastructure Unification
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Led the migration from AWS CloudFormation to Terraform, introducing shared modules to standardize configurations across all teams.
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Established centralized secrets management to improve security and reduce environment drift.
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Pipeline Modernization
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Rebuilt GitLab pipelines into modular, trunk-based workflows, enabling teams to quickly adapt pipelines without affecting others.
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Added automated testing, linting, and compliance checks as reusable pipeline stages.
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Collaboration & Cultural Change
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Facilitated DevOps workshops to train teams on Terraform, GitLab pipeline best practices, and trunk-based development principles.
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Introduced a shared repository for pipeline templates and infrastructure modules, encouraging contributions from all teams.
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Documentation & Knowledge Sharing
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Authored detailed, living documentation to guide new hires and cross-functional teams in adopting the unified standards.
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Created feedback loops to continuously improve DevOps processes based on real-world usage.
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Impact
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50% faster delivery cycles through standardized, modular pipelines.
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40% reduction in onboarding time for new developers thanks to clear documentation and consistent workflows.
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Increased collaboration, with 70% of teams contributing back to the shared infrastructure and pipeline repositories within the first quarter.
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Reduced operational risk by ensuring consistent security and compliance practices across the organization.
By addressing not just the tooling but also the human side of DevOps, this initiative created a foundation for long-term efficiency, innovation, and shared ownership of engineering processes at LiveOak Bank.