At JLT Group (now part of Marsh), I worked as a Senior C# Developer on BenPal - a pensions and benefits administration platform that was first-to-market before competitors like PerkBox and PensionBee. The platform served major UK employers including McDonald's, providing user-led pension contribution management, salary sacrifice benefits, and a Flash-based (later HTML5) pension visualisation tool that showed estimated retirement outcomes.

This role was a defining moment in my career - both for the technical challenges and because it demonstrated what excellent software engineering looks like in practice. The environment was grounded in a true implementation of Scrum: definitions of ready and done were enforced, the full story point scale (1-100) was used for genuine complexity estimation, and BDD using SpecFlow was required as part of the definition of done. I've never worked anywhere since that took testing and process to this level - it remains my benchmark for professional software development.

I was deeply involved in evolving the platform's white-labelling architecture. Using Less CSS with just-in-time compilation to CSS (before CSS variables existed), we enabled different branding, user experiences, document content, and feature toggles per client - supporting approximately 10 enterprise clients in the beta release without compromising code quality or maintainability.

One of my most significant projects was designing the StreamServe document generation integration using BizTalk. This consolidated what had been multiple manual business processes - separated file feeds, console scripts, distribution to print services and email senders - into a single automated workflow. BizTalk acted as an event pub/sub hub, translating data payloads into StreamServe-specific contracts and coordinating document generation and distribution. This project represented my first substantial architecture leadership role, and it reinforced the distributed systems thinking I'd begun developing at Brightside.

I also collaborated with a paired Romanian development team (approximately 6-10 people mirroring our UK team size) on a data warehousing solution using Change Data Capture (CDC) for real-time analytics and compliance reporting. This was my introduction to distributed team coordination, using Team Foundation Server and daily video catch-ups to coordinate epic-level work across time zones.