RIA Compliance Infrastructure

NerdWallet Advisors operates as a legally segregated Registered Investment Advisor (RIA) subject to strict financial regulatory standards under the SEC Marketing Rule and FINRA Rule 2210.

Because of these regulatory boundaries, the advisory line required complete infrastructural and data segregation from core consumer systems.

What I Built

I partnered with the advisory engineering team to architect and stand up their independent infrastructure stack and compliance evaluation pipeline:

1. Isolated Cloud Infrastructure: Engineered dedicated, isolated Terraform infrastructure repositories and automated deployment pipelines, ensuring complete network, access, and data isolation from main company environments.
2. Deterministic Compliance Evaluation: Authored legal-compliance and security evaluation skills based on counsel reviews, establishing 16 discrete evaluation checkpoints (covering fee disclosures, hypothetical performance disclaimers, promissory language, and testimonial boundaries) to test marketing and advisor copy.
3. Comprehensive Automated Testing: Developed a 907-test Jest evaluation harness alongside full Playwright end-to-end regression testing to ensure prompt changes never drift out of compliance.
4. Edge Architecture & Authentication: Deployed on Cloudflare Pages and Workers with Okta OIDC integration and group-based role authorization, ensuring strict access boundaries.

Impact

The isolated infrastructure provided the RIA team with complete deployment autonomy and robust regulatory compliance safeguards without creating operational dependencies on core engineering.