Legacy payment systems are some of the most fragile, tightly coupled, and operationally risky platforms in financial services. At SoFi (Galileo), our ACH payment system was no exception — deeply intertwined, difficult to change, and dependent on manual operations that created reliability challenges and slowed down innovation. As we began moving our infrastructure to AWS, it became clear that simply lifting and shifting the old architecture wouldn’t solve the underlying problems.
In this talk, I’ll share how we’re modernizing a mission‑critical payment platform by breaking apart tightly coupled components, adopting loosely coupled patterns, and using Temporal to orchestrate durable, auditable, and fault‑tolerant workflows. I’ll walk through the architectural decisions, the DevOps practices that made this transformation safe, and the lessons we learned while evolving a high‑stakes money‑movement system.
You’ll learn how durable workflows reduce operational risk, how to migrate legacy payment systems to the cloud safely, and how DevOps culture accelerates modernization in regulated environments. This is not a theoretical talk — it’s a candid, practical story of what worked, what didn’t, and what we’d do differently.
If you’re modernizing legacy systems or building reliable distributed workflows, you’ll walk away with patterns you can apply immediately.