Context
Industry: Retail / E-commerce
Client: Amway USA (via EPAM Systems)
Regions: USA, Canada, Brazil, India
Environment: Multi-region production & non-production
Focus: DevOps, cloud architecture, platform modernization
Scope: Production operations, PoCs, CI/CD, security
My involvement: Lead DevOps & DevOps Architect
Year: 2020–2021
Introduction
This project involved supporting and modernizing a large retail platform used across multiple regions, including the USA, Canada, and Brazil. The platform operated under strict availability, performance, and security requirements and served a high volume of business-critical workloads.
I was involved as Lead DevOps and DevOps Architect, responsible for the stability and evolution of the production environment, as well as for several strategic modernization initiatives.
The Situation
The platform relied on a complex production setup distributed across regions. While it supported daily business operations, parts of the architecture limited scalability, flexibility, and cost efficiency.
The organization needed to modernize delivery and infrastructure practices while keeping the platform stable and secure. At the same time, decisions had to be validated through practical experiments before being adopted at scale.
Operational pressure was high. Any change had to be carefully managed to avoid service disruption across multiple countries.
What Was Done
I led a Platform DevOps team responsible for infrastructure development, CI/CD pipelines, and operational improvements across low-level and pre-prod environments.
Several Proofs of Concept were designed and implemented. One PoC focused on migrating from a monolithic architecture toward microservices to improve scalability and delivery speed. Another PoC evaluated migration away from Akamai to Amazon AWS native services to optimize cost and performance.
CI/CD processes were designed and maintained across production and lower environments to support reliable and repeatable deployments. I also participated in regular technical discussions with architects, managers, and customer representatives to align technical decisions with business goals.
In parallel, I acted as a Lead and Mentor of cross-regional L2 (SRE) and L3 (DevOps) teams across the US, Brazil, Ukraine and India, supporting skill growth and operational maturity.
My Role
I was responsible for DevOps and infrastructure strategy, day-to-day production stability, and the technical leadership of the DevOps and SRE teams.
My role combined hands-on technical work, architectural decision-making, incident response, and coordination across teams and regions. I also served as a key technical contact for discussions with the customer and internal stakeholders.
Outcomes
The platform gained improved delivery pipelines, clearer operational practices, and validated architectural options for future modernization.
The PoCs provided practical evidence to support decisions around microservices adoption and CDN strategy. Operational stability was maintained across all regions while changes were introduced in a controlled manner.
The DevOps team matured in both technical capability and collaboration with other teams.
Key Takeaways
This project showed how modernization efforts must be balanced carefully with operational stability in large, multi-region environments.
It also highlighted the importance of validating architectural ideas through real PoCs before committing to large-scale changes, especially in customer-facing retail systems.
How This Experience Helps in Similar Situations
Many organizations operate critical platforms that must evolve without downtime. I help teams modernize infrastructure and delivery practices while keeping production stable, secure, and predictable.
This includes leading DevOps teams, designing PoCs for architectural change, improving CI/CD, and responding effectively to operational and security incidents.
Related Products & Materials
Some of the challenges addressed in this project are covered in my document packs related to DevOps maturity, CI/CD design, platform modernization, and operational readiness.
Closing
If you are responsible for evolving a large production platform under constant business pressure, this project reflects the type of leadership and hands-on work I provide.