DEC App

Since September 2020, I have been building an intellectual-property protection platform for Digital Enforcement Concepts (DEC) Ltd. I worked as one of the two principal engineers contracted to take the product from concept to production. The platform helps brand-protection teams detect, investigate, and act on online infringements, bringing together automated monitoring, case management, and evidence collection in a single workflow.

I co-architected and engineered the platform from early concept through to production, sharing full responsibility for the technology stack, its security, and day-to-day operations. Most of the system was co-developed, but I specifically led the development of several key components. A sophisticated web scraper that autonomously searches multiple e-commerce marketplaces and collects structured details about potential infringements, feeding the rest of the pipeline. I also built a robust authentication and permissions system: granular role-based access that lets organisations manage who can see, edit, and act on cases without compromising security.

On the frontend, I created a reusable UI component library used across multiple DEC projects. Every input component ships with automatic validation and error handling, which made form implementation trivial and noticeably improved consistency across the product surface. I also built a Chrome extension that lets users capture infringement evidence directly from e-commerce sites. It shares the same TypeScript and React stack as the main application, so the in-browser experience feels continuous with the platform itself.

The platform is built with TypeScript, React, Node.js, and SQL, and deployed on AWS. Working in that environment gave me hands-on experience with cloud services, serverless architectures, and edge-location optimisations — choices that matter when scraping workloads, API traffic, and user-facing apps all need to stay reliable and cost-effective.

Beyond engineering, I maintain the product roadmap and prioritise the backlog, keeping development aligned with business goals, user needs, and what will move cases forward fastest. That mix of building and product ownership is what makes DEC one of my longest-running projects — still in active development as of publishing this article.

DEC has since been acquired by IP House, where I joined as a Senior Product Manager. The platform I helped build from the ground up is now part of a larger business, where we continue to shape state-of-the-art solutions for end-to-end IP protection.