Shipping Through Chaos: Engineering Resilience Across Borders: Kaustubh Hiware
What does it take to ship critical backend infrastructure in a legally complex, high-stakes e- commerce environment, across 10 teams, 3 platforms, 2 timezones, and during a structural reorganization? Over nine months, I led a cross-functional effort at Japan’s largest C2C marketplace to enable business buyers on a consumer-first platform. The stakes were high: regulatory ambiguity, evolving specs, legacy systems, and a live production environment that couldn’t break. This talk breaks down how resilience is built not just into systems, but into architecture, communication, and decision-making. I’ll share how we coordinated changes across 7 backend services, 3 client platforms, and multiple staging environments, while handling legal constraints, inter-team dependencies, and a variety of collaboration styles. You’ll hear about a 61-page design doc, 30K+ backend lines changed in 2 months, and the tradeoffs made to keep it all stable. This talk also looks at the human side of resilience: adapting to org shifts, mentoring under load, recognizing design dark patterns, reading Japanese laws for DB normalizations, and building trust through transparency.
