Scaled a high-growth social-commerce platform to 30M+ users at peak, and the #3 most-downloaded app in the Philippines in early 2021. An AWS case study documented the operating efficiency: about +600% user growth at only about +50% monthly cost, with chat concurrency from 100K to 1M simultaneous users.
Context and stakes
From 2019 to 2022 I moved from Senior Software Engineer to Principal Software Engineer with acting CTO duties on a fast-growing social-commerce platform with a rewards system used across a large merchant network.
Growth was volatile and often celebrity-driven, producing unpredictable traffic spikes that the platform's fixed-capacity infrastructure could not absorb.
Problem
Infrastructure limits were causing instability before migration, including outages during growth periods. The platform needed to move from fixed capacity constraints to an architecture that could absorb rapid demand changes without runaway cost.
Intervention
I helped lead an all-in cloud migration onto managed services (relational, serverless, CDN, container orchestration, and media processing), shifting the platform away from brittle, self-limited infrastructure. I also provided foundational engineering behind the rewards transaction service used across multiple product surfaces.