Keeping fulfilment running for Australia's largest online fashion retailer
Led a five-person team supporting order and inventory systems handling 50,000+ orders a day, including a Black Friday with $10M in single-day sales.
The problem
The Iconic has 2M+ active customers, 20M+ monthly visits and peaks above 50,000 orders a day across a 3.75-million-unit fulfilment operation. It needed a dedicated engineering team to keep order and inventory systems running, including after-hours production support across Australian time zones.
What I did
- Led a dedicated five-person South African engineering team embedded in the Fulfilment Center team. We owned the order and inventory issue-management microservices and the Australia Post carrier integration.
- Diagnosed inventory discrepancies across event-driven SQS pipelines spanning 130,000+ storage locations.
- Found and fixed a race condition in slot allocation under peak load, where concurrent processing could assign the same consolidation slot to several orders across the manual, ASRS and AMR collection systems. Row-level locking made slot assignment atomic.
- Kept fulfilment running through Black Friday 2022, when the platform did $10M in single-day sales, including draining an SQS consumer backlog.
How I showed up
We were a team in Cape Town supporting a business in Sydney. Trust depended on being reachable, predictable and honest about what was broken. I ran after-hours database migrations and production support on Australian time, did code reviews and mentored the team. On the day that mattered most, we were the reason orders kept moving.
Outcome
For three years the fulfilment platform was never the reason an order was late, including on the busiest day of the year.