Supply Chain

As most everyone knows by now, Wayfair is a major e-commerce company focused on furniture and home goods. What you may not be aware of are the many technical elements happening behind the scenes to ensure that 22 million products are delivered to you on time. This is an area I’m familiar with as I work in Wayfair’s International Supply Chain Engineering (ISC) department. A relatively new group, our journey began with a significant realization—we needed to break our monolith into microservices. Specifically, we needed to manage authorization across all of our new microservices. The answer was the Oso authorization framework. For this blog, I’ll walk through the steps we took to make these changes. This includes how we initially broke apart our monorepo, the process of writing a proof of concept with Oso, and how we moved to production with the support and collaboration of Oso’s engineers.

In this blog post, you’ll get an inside look at our Wayfair CastleGate Logistics team which develops and designs the technology that enables us to get over 22 million products from the manufacturer to our customers’ homes. This will be the first in a series of posts focused on our Logistics Tech team, providing an insight into our challenges, what drives/motivates us, and how we work at Wayfair! Follow along to learn more about what it’s like to work at Wayfair!

I love operations engineering, full stop. Focusing on this unique set of problems gets me out of bed every day and drives a high energy level. I have spent a significant amount of time in various aspects of operations engineering throughout my career, and have found this area of software engineering not always so readily accessible or accurately portrayed. In this post, I'll shed some light on the discipline.