Scaling the Bolt+ Campaigns Platform
Led end-to-end architecture and scaling of Bolt+ campaign infra — drove 15% user-base growth and 5% food-delivery revenue lift across 200M+ MAU.
The problem
Bolt+ is Bolt's subscription loyalty programme across 200M+ monthly active users. The campaigns platform that powers promotions, upsells, and vendor campaigns was struggling: cascading failures under peak load, latency spikes during retry storms, and inflating cloud spend. Growth was bottlenecked by infra — not marketing.
Approach
- Led a 6-engineer team to re-architect the Bolt+ Campaign service around SOLID principles and event-driven updates.
- Introduced per-tenant, per-route rate limiting and circuit breakers to contain downstream failures.
- Shipped AI-powered upsell algorithms that lifted real-time conversion in multiple markets.
- Built infrastructure performance tooling that surfaced hot paths, N+1 queries, and chatty RPC calls.
- Delivered a Self-Managed Campaigns Portal enabling vendors to own their promos end-to-end.
Key decisions
The legacy system was paying the bills. We migrated service-by-service behind feature flags, keeping revenue flowing throughout.
One breaker per service hid which downstream was actually failing. Per-dependency breakers surfaced the real culprit and kept healthy paths alive.
Bottlenecks were human, not technical. Giving vendors a portal dissolved the support queue.
Trade-offs
- Per-dependency breakers add complexity — compensated by a shared library and dashboards.
- AI upsell algorithms require continuous evaluation — invested in an experimentation harness.
Impact
- Bolt+ Campaign drove +15% user-base growth across global markets.
- +5% food-delivery revenue lift attributed to the new campaign infra.
- 30–35% faster p99 response times under peak load.
- ~10% infrastructure cost reduction via hot-path tuning.
- Led 15+ senior technical interviews; mentored the team from mid to senior.
Have a system that needs to scale — or stop breaking?
I work with a small number of teams each month on architecture reviews, scaling, and hands-on backend engineering. If that sounds like you, let's talk.