06 / REPRESENTATIVE BUILDS
Systems we have shipped
Representative builds. Details composited from real engagement patterns. Not client endorsements.
Distributed Operations Platform
Problem
A multi-region operator ran plant scheduling in spreadsheets and three disconnected vendor tools. Night shifts could not see live capacity. Incidents were reconstructed from chat logs. The operations team spent more time reconciling data than acting on it.
Constraints
Multi-region with partition tolerance required. Write path had to survive network splits. Read models needed sub-second freshness for operator consoles. Audit trail was non-negotiable for regulatory compliance.
Architecture
Event-sourced operations log with regional read models. Single operator console as the system of engagement. Write path designed for partition tolerance with causal consistency. Event replay for audit and incident reconstruction.
Implementation
Go services for the write path. Postgres with logical replication for regional read models. NATS for event fan-out across regions. TypeScript console with optimistic concurrency on every mutation. OpenTelemetry traces on all write operations.
Scheduling and incident timeline live in one system. Night shifts see the same data as day shifts. Spreadsheets retired from the critical path. The audit trail serves compliance without manual reporting.
Automation Orchestration Engine
Problem
A marketplace team had 70+ Zapier zaps, no retries they trusted, and a weekly ritual of re-running failed jobs by hand. Nobody knew which zaps were critical. Failures surfaced in Slack threads that nobody owned.
Constraints
Exactly-once semantics required for financial operations. Dead-letter needed operator replay, not just alerting. Connector SDK had to be typed so non-core engineers could add integrations without touching the engine.
Architecture
Durable workflow engine with named executions and full history. Idempotency keys at the edge for exactly-once effects. Dead-letter queue with operator replay console. Typed connector SDK for new integrations.
Implementation
Temporal-style orchestrators in TypeScript. Redis for lease management and distributed locks. Postgres for execution history and audit. OpenTelemetry on every activity for tracing and debugging.
Failed work became a queue with an owner, not a Slack thread. Replay is a button. New connectors ship without touching the core engine. The weekly rerun ritual disappeared entirely.
Real-Time Analytics Infrastructure
Problem
Product and finance disagreed on revenue because three pipelines defined "paid" differently, each with a 12-hour delay. The argument was never about strategy — it was about which number was real.
Constraints
Exactly-once loaders into the warehouse. Streaming aggregates for operator dashboards had to be sub-second. Finance needed audit-grade accuracy with full lineage. Semantic layer had to be queryable by both teams.
Architecture
Canonical event bus as the single source of truth. Exactly-once loaders into the warehouse. Streaming aggregates for the operator view. dbt for the semantic layer with versioned models and freshness checks.
Implementation
Kafka for the event bus. Flink-style streaming jobs for real-time aggregates. ClickHouse for hot reads on operator dashboards. Snowflake for finance with full dbt lineage. One metrics catalog both teams query.
One number for "paid." Operator dashboards update in seconds, finance in minutes. The argument moved from "which number" to "what to do with it."
AI Workflow System
Problem
A support org pasted tickets into a public chatbot. Answers drifted with no evaluation. PII left the perimeter on every request. Nobody knew if the model was getting better or worse over time.
Constraints
PII had to stay inside the VPC. Write actions (closing tickets, updating records) required human confirmation. Quality had to be a tracked metric with regression detection. Inference costs had to be bounded.
Architecture
Retrieval over an internal corpus with permissions-aware filtering. Tool-calling into the ticketing API for write actions. Eval suite running on golden tickets weekly. Human-confirm step on any write operation.
Implementation
Python inference workers with model versioning. Permissions-aware retriever enforcing access control at query time. Streaming responses over gRPC for low-latency UX. Traces stored for weekly eval runs and regression detection.
Suggested replies stay inside the VPC. Write actions require an agent click. Quality is a number that can get worse — and we notice before customers do.
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