Basepaws
Most systems do not fail because of technology. They fail because structure, ownership, and the ability to change are not designed together.
Basepaws is one of the clearest recent examples of my work building a platform from an early-stage environment, scaling it in production, and evolving it through acquisition without interrupting the business.
Basepaws: from early-stage startup to acquisition
I joined Basepaws in 2019 as Lead Engineer and Software Architect. The company was developing pet-genetics products, but its operational technology was fragmented across e-commerce systems, laboratory spreadsheets, customer-care tools, content platforms, and DNA-processing workflows.
The challenge was not simply to replace old software. The challenge was to create one coherent platform while the company continued processing samples, serving customers, launching products, and changing its organization.
The starting point
The existing environment included heterogeneous systems such as Laravel applications, Shopify, content platforms, and Excel-based laboratory workflows.
Each part solved an immediate need, but the overall structure made change increasingly difficult. Commercial operations, laboratory processes, customer care, veterinary workflows, and DNA processing needed clearer boundaries and a shared architectural direction.
My role and ownership
My role combined software architecture, hands-on backend engineering, technical leadership, and incremental modernization.
I designed the architectural core, defined service and domain boundaries, built critical backend components, and guided the migration from disconnected systems toward a unified platform.
The objective was not a big-bang rewrite. The platform had to evolve while the business remained fully operational.
How the platform evolved
I used incremental replacement rather than disruptive reconstruction. Existing workflows were moved gradually into clearer services and domains, preserving compatibility with systems that still had to remain in production.
The platform connected laboratory operations, customer care, e-commerce, veterinary workflows, and DNA processing while keeping those responsibilities understandable and independently evolvable.
The core architecture was stabilized within approximately six months and remained open to future serverless or Kubernetes-based evolution without requiring a structural redesign.
Growth in production
The same architectural core supported the company as it grew from roughly 100 to 200,000 customers and from 6 to more than 50 employees.
This required more than handling traffic. It required handling organizational change, new products, new operational workflows, and new technical responsibilities without turning the platform into a bottleneck.
Acquisition by Zoetis
Basepaws was acquired by Zoetis in June 2022. I continued with Zoetis until October 2024 and led the next stage of platform evolution.
This work included post-acquisition requirements, cloud-transition strategy toward Azure, CI/CD with GitHub Actions, stronger service boundaries, support for veterinary clinics, and expansion into new business domains while maintaining production continuity and backward compatibility.
Read the official Zoetis acquisition announcement →
Why this experience matters
This was not an isolated architecture exercise. It was a product and platform built inside a changing company, used in production, scaled through real growth, and evolved after acquisition by a global organization.
It represents a recurring pattern in my career: building complex systems from the ground up, making them governable, and allowing them to evolve without interrupting the business.
Other build-and-scale experience
Basepaws is the most recent and directly relevant example, but similar work appears throughout my career across large-scale e-commerce, banking platforms, industrial AI, telecommunications, and automated retail.