Ironforge Platform
Ironforge · Head of Engineering · 2022-2023
The Situation
Ironforge's monolithic Express.js backend was buckling under growth. API response times averaged 4.2 seconds, infrastructure costs were spiraling, and the platform couldn't handle the concurrent user load their sales team was closing.
Why It Mattered
Every slow API call was a customer considering the competitor. At 4.2 seconds per request, users were abandoning workflows mid-task. The engineering team was stuck in a cycle of patching symptoms while the monolith grew more fragile. Scaling up meant scaling costs linearly — an unsustainable trajectory that threatened the company's ability to grow.
The Approach
Led a complete architectural transformation: decomposed the monolith into event-driven Lambda functions, introduced Redis caching at strategic data paths, and implemented EventBridge for asynchronous processing. Built the infrastructure with AWS CDK for repeatable, version-controlled deployments. Introduced serverless observability and detailed documentation for the team.
The Result
API response times dropped from 4.2s to 430ms — an 876% improvement. Infrastructure costs fell by 88%. The platform scaled to handle 60K+ concurrent users with auto-scaling that matched demand without manual intervention. Took Ironforge from an idea to an enterprise-grade product.
The Ironforge engagement was a transformation story: taking a rough concept and building it into a production-ready enterprise product, without disrupting active users along the way.
The key insight was that the monolith’s bottlenecks weren’t uniformly distributed. By profiling request patterns, we identified that 80% of latency came from 3 critical data paths. Targeted caching and decomposition of those paths into Lambda functions delivered the majority of the performance gains, while EventBridge decoupled the remaining synchronous operations.
The result wasn’t just faster — it was fundamentally more resilient. The new architecture auto-heals, auto-scales, and costs a fraction of the original infrastructure.
"I had the pleasure of working with Edithson at Ironforge, where he consistently showcased exceptional technical expertise, leadership, and adaptability. Edithson's contributions were instrumental in taking Ironforge from an idea to an enterprise-grade product, and I have no doubt he will continue to excel in any role he's tasked with. Highly recommended!"