System design & architecture

The expensive failures trace back to decisions made months earlier: where the service boundaries sit, which data lives where, what happens when a dependency is down. Those decisions are cheap on a whiteboard and expensive in production, so that’s where we spend the design time.

What we design

• Commerce architectures. Storefront, backend, and the systems around them: ERP, PIM, WMS, payments, search. Which parts to buy, which to build, and where the boundaries belong.
• Integration topologies: event-driven versus request-driven, queues and dead-letter handling, idempotency, and what “eventually consistent” means for an order that must ship tomorrow.
• Data flow and ownership. One system of record per fact. Most integration bugs we’re hired to fix trace back to two systems both believing they own the price.
• Scalability and failure modes. Load profiles for campaign spikes, cache strategy, graceful degradation: what customers see when the recommendation engine is down should be a slightly plainer page, not an error.
• Migration paths. How to get from the current architecture to the target one in steps that each ship value, instead of a two-year rewrite that delivers nothing until the very end.

How it’s delivered

Architecture work is part of most of our engagements, and it’s also available standalone: a design review of an architecture you’re about to commit to, a written target architecture with a migration plan, or a second opinion when two vendors propose incompatible architectures. The output is always a document your team can execute without us.

What we optimize for

We default to boring technology and the smallest system that meets the requirements, and we design assuming the team maintaining the system will be smaller than the team that built it.