Engineering Staff Augmentation — E-commerce Retailer, Dallas, USA
The Situation
A Dallas-based e-commerce retailer processing 18,000 orders daily had been running its order management and inventory system on a platform it had outgrown 18 months earlier. The system was holding. Just. Peak season the previous year had produced 4 outages across Black Friday and Cyber Monday, each lasting between 40 minutes and 2 hours. The cost in lost orders and customer refunds had been calculated at $2.3 million across the 4 incidents.
The decision to replatform had been made in January. By September, with 14 weeks to the Black Friday deadline, the internal engineering team of 22 was already at capacity maintaining the existing system while simultaneously trying to build the new one. Progress on the replatform was at roughly 40% of where it needed to be.
The CTO had two options. Delay the replatform and go into peak season on the old system again, accepting the risk of another $2 million-plus outage window. Or find engineers fast enough to finish the build in time.
What Amorisoft Did
Amorisoft received the brief on a Tuesday. The requirements were specific: backend engineers with experience on high-throughput order management systems, frontend engineers familiar with headless commerce architecture, and QA engineers who had done load testing at scale. Generalists were not going to work at this stage of the build.
A longlist of 28 candidates was delivered by Thursday. The CTO and his two engineering leads ran a compressed interview process across the following 8 days, with Amorisoft scheduling back to back sessions to keep the pipeline moving. Reference checks ran in parallel.
10 engineers were confirmed by day 14. System access and codebase onboarding were completed by day 16. All 10 were embedded directly into the existing sprint structure with no separate workstream.
Amorisoft's delivery manager flagged one risk in week 3: the QA load testing approach being used by the augmented team was designed for the architecture of the old platform, not the new one. Left uncorrected it would have produced test results that did not reflect real peak season conditions. The delivery manager raised it in the weekly engineering call. The CTO confirmed the issue, the QA lead rewrote the testing framework over the following week, and the corrected approach was in place before the first full load test ran.
The replatform went live 9 days before the Black Friday deadline.
Results
The new platform went live 9 days ahead of the Black Friday deadline. 18,000 orders were processed on day one without a single processing failure. Platform uptime across the full peak season, covering Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the 3 weeks following, ran at 99.98%. The 4 outages from the prior year's peak season did not repeat. The $2.3 million outage cost from the previous year was avoided in full. At engagement close, 7 of the 10 engineers were retained on extended contracts through the following Q1.