CarNext.com

CarNext brought me in to develop its online B2C sales platform, serving 22 countries across Europe. Over a three-year freelance engagement, my responsibilities grew from full-stack engineer to technical lead, leading both front- and backend developers within the checkout team.

I initially worked on the online showroom experience, before shifting my focus to optimizing the end-to-end checkout process. As technical lead, I worked with CarNext's product owners, architects, UX designers, and engineers on features that improved the user journey and the stability of the platform.

The biggest backend change was the redesign of checkout. The checkout lived in the monolith as one fixed wizard, while every country needed its own steps. We redesigned it as an event-driven system with AWS Lambda and Kafka. A checkout service coordinates a configurable sequence of steps per country and tenant, such as finance, trade-in, ancillaries, payment and delivery. Each step is owned by its own domain service.

Beyond coding, I helped the engineering organization through a period of change.

As a Senior Full Stack Engineer and Technical Lead, my responsibilities included:

• Building the online showroom and checkout of a multi-locale, multi-tenant web store
• Building trade-in with real-time car appraisal, the Sitecore CMS integration and internal web applications for sales and country teams
• Leading the front- and backend developers of the checkout team
• Redesigning the checkout backend from a monolith into event-driven services on Kafka and AWS Lambda
• Modernizing the frontend architecture from Redux and GraphQL to React Hooks and React Query
• Integrating A/B testing and analytics, and improving performance across the platform
• Hosting technical guild meetups and mentoring engineers