Deel
We joined Deel when real-time HR data had to cross borders, vendors, and compliance rules without drama. Klarna and Coinbase needed HRIS integrations that behaved like infrastructure: always on, low-latency, and precise about identity, payroll, and access. Batch syncs weren’t enough; the business needed live flows that wouldn’t page anyone at 3 AM.
We built services for streaming pipelines and idempotent microservices. Retries were safe, ordering was explicit, and PII paths stayed encrypted and audited. Observability was first-class, so support could see the same truth as engineering.
Day-to-day, that meant onboarding events moved in seconds instead of release cycles. Finance and People Ops stopped reconciling CSVs and started trusting dashboards. SLAs were met calmly, incident load dropped, and integrations scaled cleanly as new markets and tools came online.
The quiet win was communication. We wrote runbooks the way we wrote code — clear ownership, sharp boundaries, plain language. Product, security, and client teams shared the same mental model, so launches felt uneventful in the best possible way.
Alibaba
At Alibaba, we engineered core paths for AliExpress during the year’s biggest stress tests — 11.11 and 3.28. Traffic arrived in unpredictable waves from every time zone, and the only acceptable user experience was “instant.” Promotions changed the demand curve minute by minute; the platform had to absorb it without flinching.
We shaped the hot path for scale: fan-out with sharded keys, aggressive caching on read-heavy edges, write isolation for critical counters, and adaptive rate control that protected downstreams without throttling growth. Circuit breakers failed fast and recovered fast; state stayed close to compute to avoid cross-region chatter.
Under load, the system sustained 100+ million requests per second with stable tail latencies and no user-visible incidents. That stability translated directly to sales and seller trust: teams could launch bold promos knowing the rails would hold, and buyers experienced smooth search, cart, and checkout flows when it mattered most.
The human work mattered as much as the code. We rehearsed traffic with synthetic bursts, ran chaos drills, and kept game-day comms crisp—single sources of truth, short loops, decisive rollbacks. The best compliment we got: during the biggest peaks of the year, hardly anyone noticed us. The system just worked.
