Espresa: Scaling Global Employee Engagement & Wellness with a Cloud-Native Platform

The LeverX team developed a culture benefits platform that delivers an immersive employer experience, ensuring better recognition of HR work, and improving the company’s overall image.

Client

Espresa is a technology company focused on improving workplace culture and employee experience. Serving mid-to-large enterprises across the United States and Europe, Espresa enables organizations to deliver a wide range of services and benefits that support employee well-being, engagement, and productivity.

Challenge

The client wanted to create a comprehensive platform that would simplify and unify interactions between HR teams, employees, internal departments, and third-party service providers. Their goal was to offer a streamlined, digital experience that enabled companies to provide employees with easy access to corporate benefits, wellness programs, reimbursements, social events, and internal communities.

One of the key aspects was designing a multi-tenant platform that could accommodate the diverse range of services, engagement methods, and integrations required.

Solution

The LeverX Emerline team has been involved in all stages of the project, including architecture, design, development, implementation, and support, for both web and mobile (iOS and Android) versions.

We achieved full platform functionality in under 12 months, transforming the idea into a fully functional platform. With an ongoing development process, we continually enhance the product through incremental improvements.

The platform allows users to provide on-site and online services to employees, including simple access to corporate insurance programs, wellness initiatives, social events, or internal interest groups.

To support all the services a company might want to offer, our teams established a wide range of integrations, including those with calendars, communication and collaboration tools, payment systems, health data sources, global reward systems, Blackhawk gift cards, etc. Other integrations included those for custom reports, as well as integration with SFTP and Analytics systems.

The six main solution modules are: 

• Events Management: enables users to create virtual employee meetings, meetups, office hour slots, multi-track events, and gym schedules while monitoring attendance and involvement based on excellent on-demand analytics.
• Wellbeing + Fitness: facilitates access to off-site classes, including those offered by top-tier partners.
• Reimbursements + Allowances: enables employees to take advantage of reimbursement programs globally and in any currency.
• Challenges + Achievements: supports gamified and mobile challenges for individuals and teams, with the opportunity to reward employees for participation in activities; the integration with health data sources contributes to the better well-being of employees while improving their engagement.
• Rewards + Recognition: leverages a culture of appreciation in the organization, recognizing and sharing employees' accomplishments in a meaningful and timely way.
• Employee Resource Groups: help to build business culture by connecting employees throughout the organization and supporting formal and informal interest groups.

Key features:

• In-app and integrated calendars: solutions like Google Calendar, Outlook, and Apple Calendar support the scheduling of programs, taking into account time zones and providing the waitlist option.
• Support of online classes with QR code check-ins for the programs.
• Custom reporting and internal analytics system: provides information on user activity and utilization, enabling HR teams to see and assess the results of their work using real-time data and act accordingly.
• In-app payments: integration with Stripe supports multiple currencies; the platform also has an internal currency that, depending on internal exchange rates, can be converted into real currency.
• Notification system: includes push notifications, custom notifications sent based on scheduled rules, and notifications via SMS and email, connecting everyone in the organization.
• Customization options: enable organizations to adjust the appearance of the solution (colors, style, language, etc.) according to their corporate style.
• Permissions system: comprises different user roles with different levels of permissions.

Technology Stack

The Espresa platform is built on a modern, cloud-native architecture designed for scalability, security, and seamless integration with enterprise ecosystems.

Cloud infrastructure & DevOps: AWS + Kubernetes + GitLab CI/CD

AWS provides the foundation for application hosting, data storage, networking, and global availability. A Kubernetes cluster ensures elastic scaling and resilient orchestration of microservices. GitLab CI/CD pipelines automate builds, testing, deployments, and environment management, while Grafana delivers real-time monitoring and observability.

Backend services: Python, Pyramid, AWS Aurora RDS

Backend services are developed using Python and the Pyramid framework, enabling flexible, modular, and high-performance service logic. AWS Aurora RDS ensures reliable, scalable relational database storage with automated backups, fault tolerance, and high availability.

Frontend: JavaScript, React, Redux

The web interface is built using React and Redux, providing a responsive, component-driven user experience with robust state management. JavaScript enables dynamic UI interactions and customizable workflows.

Mobile applications: Kotlin, Java, Swift, Objective-C

Native mobile apps are developed for both major platforms: Android, using Java and Kotlin, and iOS, using Swift and Objective-C. This approach ensures optimal performance, deep device integration, and a consistent mobile experience.

Enterprise integrations & external Services

The platform supports deep connectivity with: 

HR systems – Workday, BambooHR

Communication tools – Slack, Google Workspace

Identity providers– Okta, Ping Identity, Workspace ONE UEM (AirWatch), Ivanti Neurons for MDM (MobileIron)

Service vendors – Salesforce, Zendesk, Cisco Jasper

These integrations enable seamless authentication, employee data synchronization, service delivery, device enrollment, and communication workflows.

AWS & platform components

Espresa leverages a broad range of AWS to ensure performance, reliability, and operational efficiency:

• AWS S3 – Object storage for assets and media
• AWS CloudFront – Global CDN for fast content delivery
• AWS ALB with ACM – Secure and load-balanced traffic management
• AWS ECS Fargate – Serverless container execution
• AWS ElastiCache – In-memory caching for performance optimization
• AWS OpenSearch – Search and analytics engine
• AWS Transfer Family – Secure file transfer services
• AWS Route 53 – DNS management
• AWS VPC & EC2 – Secure, isolated networking and compute resources
• AWS SSM – Systems management and configuration
• AWS Security Hub – Centralized security posture management

Results

The online employee service platform created by LeverX Emerline is a popular solution among businesses in the United States and Europe. The developed platform has the capacity to enhance workplace operations by reducing routine working processes, streamlining department interaction, and providing engaging activities.

Here are the first results:

• 98% customer retention rate
• 99% customer satisfaction rate
• 98.5% average increase in annual engagement with the platform’s 99% positive recommendations

We keep improving the solution, putting a strong emphasis on usability so that thousands of users can work with an intuitive interface on the preferred platform, either web or mobile, increasing their productivity, and staying committed to their workplace for a significantly longer period.