Client & context
A large real estate company operated a platform that aggregated data from over a hundred sources and served it to various internal tools and customer-facing systems. Over the years, the platform had grown into a multi-database, multi-server system with:
- Over 300 GB of databases.
- Over 3 TB of files.
- Numerous integrations with real estate data providers and internal applications.
The system was fragile and difficult to evolve, yet essential for daily operations.
Challenges
- Multi-database, multi-server architecture with complex dependencies and replication.
- Large datasets (hundreds of GBs of data, terabytes of files) making maintenance and backups non-trivial.
- Legacy code and scripts controlling imports, exports, and transformations of real estate data.
- The platform needed both stabilization and new feature development, without downtime.
What I did
1. Assessment and stabilization
- Performed a deep analysis of the existing architecture, data flows, and deployment setup.
- Identified critical risks (data inconsistencies, fragile scripts, backup gaps) and addressed them first.
- Fixed key bugs that were causing failures or data quality issues.
2. Database and infrastructure work
- Worked with multiple databases to:
- Ensure consistency between different data stores.
- Improve query performance on the heaviest operations.
- Helped ensure backups and disaster recovery strategies matched the actual size and complexity of the data.
- Simplified and documented deployment and operations procedures where possible.
3. Sustaining and new feature development
- Provided ongoing sustaining engineering:
- Fixing production issues.
- Supporting new data sources and integration changes.
- Implemented new features for:
- Data search and filtering.
- Reporting and internal tooling.
- Kept a strong focus on not breaking existing workflows used daily by the business.
Results
- The real estate aggregation platform was brought back to a stable, maintainable state.
- The company could continue to rely on a system managing hundreds of GBs of data and terabytes of files without a risky rewrite.
- New features and improvements could be delivered while maintaining data integrity and uptime.
- Documentation and operational understanding improved, reducing the “single point of failure” risk.
Tech & responsibilities
- Role: Senior sustaining engineer / platform specialist
- Technologies: PHP, Symfony, SQL, multi-database setup, data integration, real estate/MLS-related tooling, scripting, backup and operations practices
- Scope: Stabilization, bug fixing, performance improvements, new features, and operational support for a complex legacy platform
If you have a large, business-critical legacy platform in real estate or another data-heavy domain, I can help you stabilize it and continue evolving it safely.
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