Overview

Joined Ipsy as a DevOps Engineer, working on infrastructure for one of the largest beauty subscription e-commerce platforms. This role overlapped with my time at Michelin, representing consulting work for the beauty platform serving millions of subscribers.

Key Responsibilities

Infrastructure Management

  • Managed AWS infrastructure for e-commerce platform
  • Built and maintained Kubernetes clusters
  • Implemented auto-scaling for traffic spikes
  • Designed disaster recovery strategies

CI/CD and Automation

  • Created deployment pipelines for microservices
  • Implemented GitOps workflows
  • Built automated testing and quality gates
  • Established infrastructure as code practices

Database Operations

  • Managed PostgreSQL and MongoDB clusters
  • Implemented backup and recovery procedures
  • Optimized database performance
  • Led data migration projects

Technical Challenges

Scale Management

Ipsy operated at significant scale:

  • Millions of monthly beauty subscribers
  • High traffic during product launches
  • Complex inventory management systems
  • Global content delivery requirements

E-commerce Specifics

  • Subscription billing infrastructure
  • Inventory synchronization across warehouses
  • Payment processing reliability
  • Personalization algorithm infrastructure

Technology Stack

Cloud:          AWS (EKS, RDS, S3, CloudFront)
Containers:     Docker, Kubernetes, Helm
IaC:            Terraform, CloudFormation
Databases:      PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis
Monitoring:     Datadog, CloudWatch, PagerDuty
CI/CD:          Jenkins, GitLab CI, ArgoCD

Key Achievements

Infrastructure Reliability

  • Achieved 99.95% uptime for critical services
  • Reduced deployment failures by 70%
  • Improved mean time to recovery (MTTR) by 50%

Cost Optimization

  • Implemented right-sizing strategies
  • Optimized reserved instance usage
  • Result: 25% reduction in AWS costs

Security Improvements

  • Implemented infrastructure security scanning
  • Established secrets management with Vault
  • Created compliance automation for SOC 2

Overlap with Michelin

This role ran concurrently with my position at Michelin North America (Sep 2018 - Dec 2020):

  • Michelin: Full-time Engineering Manager role
  • Ipsy: Consulting/DevOps contract work
  • Demonstrated ability to deliver value across multiple engagements
  • Both roles were remote, enabling effective time management

Learnings

Working at Ipsy taught me:

  • E-commerce Scale: Handling subscription commerce at scale
  • DevOps Culture: Embedding DevOps practices in organizations
  • Cost Management: Balancing performance with budget
  • Security Compliance: Meeting SOC 2 and PCI requirements

Transition

After Ipsy, moved into other consulting roles and eventually founded Euler Tools, bringing e-commerce scale lessons to Web3 infrastructure.