The challenge
Pyxwell, an Austin-based community solar platform, had grown their subscriber base from 2,000 to 18,000 in 8 months after expanding to 3 new states. Their Django monolith and single-region AWS setup were buckling — page loads exceeded 8 seconds during enrollment periods, their Celery task queue was backing up by hours, and their 6-person engineering team was spending 60% of their time on firefighting instead of building the billing integration their utility partners needed. They'd tried to hire senior infrastructure engineers but couldn't compete with Austin's FAANG salaries.
Our solution
We embedded three engineers with Pyxwell's team for 20 weeks — two infrastructure specialists and one senior backend engineer. We migrated their Django application to a multi-region AWS setup with RDS read replicas and ElastiCache, broke their monolithic Celery workers into dedicated task queues with proper autoscaling, implemented CloudFront with edge caching for their enrollment pages, and set up a proper observability stack with Grafana, Prometheus, and PagerDuty. Our backend engineer worked directly with their team to build the utility billing integration, mentoring two junior engineers through the process. We also established on-call runbooks and incident response procedures so the team could operate confidently without us.
The impact
“We couldn't hire senior infrastructure people in Austin. Kavora's engineers embedded with our team, fixed our scaling problems, built the billing integration we needed, and taught our junior engineers how to own it going forward. They made themselves unnecessary — and that's the highest compliment.”