New lottery platform
In 2022, a new operator won a national Lottery License. The prize came with a monumental obligation, they had to replace every legacy system inherited from the previous operator within two years. At the same time they had committed to doubling good cause donations over the ten-year license term. the final obligation was during the initial stages of the licence the new platform had to feel familiar to millions of existing players.
These obligations made this a complex project for everyone. The outgoing platform was old, unstable, and notoriously resistant to change, having operated at capacity for years. The new operator needed to integrate with multiple third-party providers while delivering a completely new digital front end across web and mobile.
Zenitech’s role centred on the digital front end: the website, native mobile apps, and the critical API layer connecting them to backend systems. The partnership grew from trust and technical understanding built through previous successful work with other lotteries. As the project matured, the Zenitech team grew to between 80 and 90 people organised into agile squads, replacing a manual, traditional delivery approach with full automation (Terraform for infrastructure provisioning, CI/CD pipelines enabling single-click deployments, and robust test coverage). The architecture ran on AWS, with Java and Spring Boot powering the backend, React driving the web experience, Jetpack Compose and SwiftUI delivering native iOS and Android apps, and Magnolia serving as a headless CMS across all digital channels.
The new platform launched successfully and has since seen approximately 50 releases. A pace unthinkable on the old platform, where even minor changes were fraught with risk. Being cloud-native on AWS means the system can now scale and throttle on demand, with far better monitoring and alerting. Zenitech now runs a dedicated SRE team to monitor and improve the system proactively. Giving the team headroom to focus on new games, features like pool play and syndicates, and a roadmap built to drive sales growth and good cause contributions for the next decade.
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