House of CB: High-Traffic Fashion E-commerce
Production work on the current luxury fashion platform (~1 sale every ~30 seconds) — backend-focused on PHP/Smarty, with occasional storefront changes, critical features and AI-assisted internal automation.
Overview
House of CB is a premium London-based fashion e-commerce platform operating at international scale on its current production stack — PHP with Smarty, MySQL, Docker and AWS, plus Next.js where the live architecture already requires it. This is the system serving customers today while the separate Next.js rebuild becomes the future admin and domain platform. The role is primarily backend on that live estate: shipping critical features that keep checkout and catalog reliable, hardening security and performance under global traffic, and integrating AI solutions and autonomous agents that automate internal workflows on the existing platform. Work also includes occasional frontend changes on the brand storefront when product needs demand it — less frequent than backend delivery, but part of day-to-day ownership of the live commerce experience — inside a global team on a high-stakes, high-traffic codebase.
Key Features
Challenges & Solutions
Operating a live international fashion platform without downtime meant careful delivery of critical backend changes, validating commerce paths after each release, and keeping MySQL performant under global traffic. Designing AI agents that plug into existing internal workflows without destabilizing production, coordinating high-impact changes across a distributed team, and occasionally touching the public storefront without breaking brand UX were constant constraints. Feature velocity had to coexist with security and stability standards on a revenue-sensitive system.
What I Learned
Production work on the current House of CB stack reinforced backend delivery under live traffic, AI-driven automation wired into real operational workflows, and measured frontend contributions on a brand storefront when needed. High-traffic international e-commerce validated how performance, security, and architectural choices compound at scale. Collaborating in a global team confirmed delivery of production-level engineering in a fast-paced commercial environment.