Soff Marketplace
A marketplace for academic work — 1.5M+ works hosted.
The main marketplace of the Soff education ecosystem — ready-made academic materials, 3D designs, website templates and freelance services.
- Role
- Senior backend engineer
- Impact
- 1.5M+ works · thousands of daily users
- Live
- soff.uz ↗
- Status
- In production
- Year
- 2025 – 2026
The problem
Keep search, checkout and browsing instant while the catalogue grows past a million items and thousands of people shop at the same time.
A marketplace is a catalogue, a search engine, a payment system and a trust system at once — and all of them have to stay fast while the catalogue grows past a million items and thousands of people browse at the same time. A marketplace lives or dies on search latency. Everything else is negotiable.
What I built
A Django and FastAPI backend with PostgreSQL for the catalogue and Redis in front of the hot paths. Listing, search and transactions are tuned for a large, growing inventory, with the heavy and slow work pushed onto async pipelines so the storefront stays responsive. The catalogue grew faster than any single query plan wanted it to.
Key decisions
Cache the hot catalogue aggressively; keep the write path honest. Anything a buyer doesn't need to wait for — indexing, notifications, analytics — moves off the request path. The marketplace should feel instant even when the warehouse behind it is enormous.
A storefront that stays fast by caching the hot catalogue and pushing indexing, notifications and analytics off the request path.
1.5M+ works · thousands of daily users
Built with
Lessons from the bench
- — A marketplace lives or dies on search latency. Everything else is negotiable.
- — The catalogue grew faster than any single query plan wanted it to.