Cloud infrastructure and DevOps support for a Western Australian energy retailer

The retailer's platform team needed cloud infrastructure and DevOps capability it could not reliably hire for in the Perth market. Software developer salaries in the current SEEK-benchmarked range run well above $100,000 for experienced engineers before superannuation, and the retailer had two DevOps roles sit unfilled for over five months, competing against the resources sector for the same small pool of specialist candidates. In the meantime, deployment cadence on the billing platform slowed, infrastructure technical debt built up, and a customer portal outage during a billing cycle peak took longer to resolve than the retailer's board considered acceptable.

The engagement began with two DevOps engineers and one cloud infrastructure engineer, reporting to a team lead in Tashkent who worked directly with the retailer's Perth-based platform manager. As the platform's release cadence increased, the team grew to five engineers, including a dedicated site reliability specialist added after the first six months to focus specifically on monitoring and incident response. The team works directly in the retailer's existing cloud environment and deployment pipeline rather than as a separate parallel system.

Offshore delivery from Tashkent, Uzbekistan, working directly inside the retailer's existing cloud environment and deployment pipeline.

Tashkent sits five hours behind Sydney standard time, and the offshore team structured its working hours to build meaningful overlap with the retailer's Perth-based platform team each day, rather than running a fully asynchronous handover. Because the billing platform holds customer personal information, the retailer treated this as an offshore disclosure under the Privacy Act 1988 and Australian Privacy Principle 8, requiring reasonable steps to ensure the Tashkent team could not breach the APPs, with accountability for any breach remaining with the retailer under section 16C regardless of who caused it. In practice this meant a data processing agreement, production customer data masked in any non-production environment the offshore team could access, and role-based access limited to infrastructure and pipeline tooling rather than raw customer records. Corpshore's security practices for this engagement are aligned with the Essential Eight framework, described to the retailer as such and never presented as a certified or audited outcome.

Average incident resolution time on the customer portal fell from a reported six hours to under two. Deployment frequency on the billing platform increased from roughly fortnightly to weekly within the first quarter, as the backlog of infrastructure technical debt was worked down. The retailer estimated it was paying approximately 36 percent less for this level of cloud and DevOps capability than it would have cost to fill the equivalent roles in the Perth market, even accounting for the cost of the additional site reliability specialist added later in the engagement.

Structuring Tashkent's shift to overlap with Perth, rather than leaving the two teams to hand off asynchronously, is what turned a five-hour time difference from a coordination problem into a genuine extension of the platform team's day.