e-commerce / infrastructure · Jan 2021 – Dec 2023
Keeping fulfilment running for Australia's largest online fashion retailer
- Node.js
- NestJS
- VueJS
- AWS (SQS, RDS)
- PostgreSQL
- MySQL
- Kubernetes
The problem
The Iconic — 2M+ active customers, 20M+ monthly visits, 50,000+ orders a day across a 3.75-million-unit fulfilment operation — needed a dedicated engineering team to keep order and inventory systems running, with after-hours production support across Australian time zones.
What I did
- Led a dedicated 5-person South African engineering team embedded in the Fulfilment Center team, maintaining and enhancing the order and inventory issue-management microservices behind daily order-state transitions at volume.
- Diagnosed inventory discrepancies across event-driven SQS pipelines spanning 130,000+ unique storage locations.
- Found and fixed a race condition in the slot-allocation system: concurrent processing could assign the same consolidation slot to multiple orders across the Manual, ASRS, and AMR collection systems. Row-level locking made slot assignment atomic.
- Kept systems standing through Black Friday 2022, when the platform did $10M in single-day sales — well beyond normal operating capacity.
- Extended SellerCenter marketplace microservices (inventory sync, order routing, fulfilment events) across hundreds of third-party sellers, and maintained the Australia Post carrier integration behind 50,000+ orders/day.
Outcome
Three years of the fulfilment platform not being the reason an order was late — including on the one day of the year it mattered most.