Deadstock: Marketplace Platform Rebuild for Operational Reliability

Context

Deadstock had a live marketplace with growing operational demands, but critical backend areas were difficult to change safely. Inventory handling, order state transitions, and error recovery paths were tightly coupled and fragile.

Constraints

• The platform had to remain live during refactor work.
• Business teams needed feature progress while core stabilization was in progress.
• Legacy flows could not be replaced in one large migration.

Architecture Highlights

• Introduced clearer domain boundaries for inventory, orders, and fulfillment flows.
• Reworked state transition handling to reduce hidden side effects.
• Added stronger job processing and retry behavior for asynchronous operations.
• Improved observability around operationally sensitive paths.

Grounded Proof Points

• Owned refactor strategy and technical sequencing while the marketplace stayed live and business operations continued.
• Led backend redesign across inventory, ordering, and fulfillment workflows to reduce brittle coupling and rollback risk.
• Balanced platform hardening with ongoing feature delivery so product teams could keep shipping during modernization.

Key Decisions

• Used incremental replacement instead of a big-bang rewrite.
• Prioritized the most failure-prone workflows first.
• Paired architecture changes with release guardrails so teams could keep shipping.

What I Owned

• Refactor strategy and sequencing.
• Backend architecture decisions and high-risk implementation paths.
• Technical coordination between product delivery and platform hardening.

Outcome

The platform moved from reactive firefighting toward controlled delivery. Teams gained confidence to ship marketplace features while the core backend became easier to reason about, test, and operate.