XPS Aurora

From April 2022 to April 2025 I was architect and principal engineer on XPS Aurora, working with XPS Group on contract. Aurora is an award-winning pensions administration platform on Azure that now serves more than 1.3 million members across about 600 schemes, including the SEI Master Trust, the Capgemini UK Pension Plan, and the police pension schemes of the Metropolitan Police, Kent, Surrey and Sussex.

What I worked on

I designed and delivered most of Aurora's front end and workflow architecture. That covered the admin portals, approvals, audits and work queues, and the event-driven CQRS engine behind joiners, leavers, retirements, transfers, divorces, deaths and trivial commutation.

I played a foundational part in building a sandboxed C# environment where actuaries write scheme rules within strict limits. Rules are versioned and can be branched, compared and validated, and nothing reaches production without approval from more than one person.

I architected payroll ingestion and the mapping between employer files and the core model, with GDPR-safe access controls, and built the bulk onboarding and legacy data migration used for large scheme transitions. I also built automated document generation for statements, benefit quotes and statutory letters, and tuned queues, caching, batching and parallelism for actuarial calculations.

The team and the outcome

I recruited and built the in-house permanent technical team, and the work helped double the share price of XPS Group, a FTSE 250 company.

The full case study is on the Nhance blog: Delivering Aurora.

Technologies Used