Business services engineering team

Key functionality

Our system consists of a variety of services, such as our own customer happiness and relationship management system, finance reporting and integration with external systems, business data and dashboards, licensing, etc.

Problem space

At PortSwigger, we like to create the best solution for our needs which often means thinking outside the box and coming up with novel solutions. Our developers are craftsmen and engineers of truly scalable products.

Some of our services are directly called from Burp instances, so performance at scale is a key requirement of the solutions we deliver.

As the team covers a wide and diverse range of services, no single requirement is the same. We strive to design solutions that address the business need and use the right technology to fit the job, rather than forcing a requirement fit in to an existing pattern.

Technologies

Our business services are running on AWS infrastructure, mainly written in C#, with the addition of JavaScript to enhance the front-end experience.

Our tooling includes Jetbrains Rider, xUnit, git, NuGet, TeamCity, Docker, and various AWS services.

What we've been working on

The business services team have been working on improving how we collaborate with our customers - this means enabling our internal teams to connect, monitor and keep in touch with customers as easily as possible.

Whilst our solutions act as the bridge between teams, they also provide some real technical challenges - this mainly stems from the ongoing requirement to maintain an environment that is both secure and scalable. You'd be surprised at how complicated sending emails in the correct order at pace can be, or searching to return the information someone wants to see - even just surfacing linked information in an easy way for us to quickly respond to customers has its own challenges.

Our recent projects include:

• Using AWS Step Functions to call time-delayed update actions via AWS Lambdas to a Net Core 3.1 Web API endpoint. This project included foresight to being able to improve these actions in the future with machine learning.

• Using Net Core background queues with auto-scaling AWS ECS Fargate instances and AuroraDB to create a "send once" system that is designed for high load. The emails sent from this are constructed using a limited markdown set and templating, with the front end written using JavaScript ES6.