QRT: Cloud infrastructure enabling autonomous development at scale

The Client

Qube Research & Technologies (QRT) is a global investment management firm operating across all liquid asset classes. The business applies a data-driven, scientific approach to investing, combining research, technology and trading expertise across global markets. At that level of operational complexity, speed, security and auditability are foundational requirements, and the underlying technology infrastructure must be built to reflect them. 

TXP was engaged by QRT’s platform team to design and implement a cloud infrastructure model capable of supporting autonomous development at scale. 

The Challenge

QRT’s platform team had become a chokepoint. Every development unit across the organisation depended on them for cloud access, resource creation, monitoring and deployment, slowing throughput and pulling the platform team away from higher-value work. 

The answer was not simply to add headcount. QRT needed a fundamentally different model: one where development units could operate autonomously, within clearly defined boundaries, without requiring constant platform team involvement. 

The specific demands were: 

• Enabling autonomous development units with their own cloud access and business constraints, without fragmenting oversight. 
• Reducing platform team dependency without sacrificing auditability or access control. 
• Ensuring all activity remained traceable and compliant with access restrictions across the organisation. 
• Delivering a solution that was automated, scalable and repeatable as the organisation continued to grow. 

The Solution

TXP’s AWS architects and engineers designed and built a secure AWS organisation from the ground up, giving QRT the structure to scale development without scaling complexity. 

The solution comprised: 

• Segregated AWS accounts and groups — providing each development unit with its own cloud environment, scoped to specific business constraints. 
• Centralised secret management — a unified, secure system for managing credentials and sensitive configuration across the organisation. 
• Searchable, filterable log monitoring — giving the platform team full visibility across all units without requiring manual intervention. 
• Infrastructure as Code throughout — every control, feature and resource templated and version-controlled, deployable consistently across environments. 
• CI/CD pipeline integration — automating deployment and resource management end to end. 

On completion, the full suite of IaC templates — covering access controls, monitoring, secret management and deployment tooling — was handed over to QRT’s platform team, ready to be applied independently across every development unit in the organisation.

The Benefits

• Platform team workload significantly reduced, freeing capacity for strategic and higher-value engineering work. 
• Development throughput improved across the organisation, with units able to move independently and at pace. 
• Full auditability and traceability maintained, with access restrictions enforced consistently at every level. 
• A scalable, automated infrastructure model that can be extended across new development units without additional platform team involvement.