Betcloud

The brief

Betcloud licenses bookmaking as a platform: one backend running many white-label bookie brands, each with its own punters, odds and admin, under Australian racing regulation. Wagering is an unforgiving domain: odds change every minute and every change must be auditable, and a bet is a financial transaction that has to be priced and settled atomically. I was the founding tech lead on the build, growing the engineering team from two of us to twelve.

Calls that mattered

• Money as an append-only ledger with balances derived on query, so a whole class of balance bugs is designed out rather than tested for.
• Full audit history on sensitive data like bets and odds, built with system-versioned tables so every change is recorded automatically.
• Live odds ingestion as an event-driven pipeline on Pub/Sub and Cloud Functions, built for fault tolerance first: retries, capped concurrency and full failure context captured for one-click diagnosis.
• Regulated flows kept inside specialist providers: KYC through greenID, payments through Fat Zebra, with responsible gambling controls and Australia-only access built in.

Results

The regulator required an independent penetration test before the platform could operate. Cobalt probed auth, the API surface and database security, and found nothing serious. The platform launched and is still live today.