Perk Shop

0→1 digital marketplace: high-traffic events, payments integrations, and retention loops.

Lead Full-Stack Engineer (Co-Founder); architecture, marketplace features, team leadership.

## Situation We built and launched a digital marketplace that had to prove value quickly: acquire users, process payments, and survive bursty event traffic. ## Constraints Founding-team bandwidth, third-party commerce/payment dependencies, and public launch deadlines with limited room for rewrites. ## Decisions Designed end-to-end marketplace architecture including rewards programs and partner integrations. Prioritized performance work when event traffic exposed load-time and concurrency pain. Treated analytics and A/B testing as product infrastructure, not an afterthought. Kept chain/wallet integrations secondary to commerce outcomes. ## Outcomes Reached 50,000+ users in six months. Processed more than $200,000 in transactions. Reduced application load times by 70% while supporting thousands of concurrent requests during high-traffic events. Improved retention by 20% through experimentation. Managed a cross-functional engineering team with co-founders on product strategy. ## Lessons Marketplace staff signal is clearest when framed as payments, reliability under load, and retention systems. What I would do differently: formalize capacity planning earlier for known event spikes instead of reacting after the first crush.

Best for roles like: Staff roles around marketplace platforms, payments-adjacent systems, and growth under load.