Lead IT Engineer
at the LEGO Group
Jul 2022 — Ongoing
LEGO Ideas & LEGO Atlas
Led ~19 engineers across two products — a team of 9 on LEGO Ideas and a team of 10 on LEGO Atlas — spanning engineering, product, and design.
On LEGO Ideas, discovery work revealed that legacy search surfaced an unfair distribution where only top creators gained visibility. The redesigned experience gives every fan creation a chance to be voted on, exposing fans to a wider range of creations for inspiration and surprise.
On LEGO Atlas, partnered directly with model designers — the people who create the sets that go in boxes — to shape a tool that balances process efficiency with creative exploration, aiming to spark ideas that ultimately reach the box. User research included questionnaires and frontend behavior monitoring to validate that the product was driving the intended design workflows.
Key achievements
- Led two LEGO Ideas pilots that shipped a modernized submission experience and a fairer search algorithm — giving every fan creation a real chance to be discovered.
- Delivered LEGO Atlas from zero to one — an internal product used by LEGO's model designers that streamlined processes while fostering a more creative design workflow.
Under the hood
On LEGO Ideas, inherited a legacy monolith and architected a greenfield replacement: a federated GraphQL API built on Apollo Federation spanning 10+ microservices. Migrated traffic from the old system using a strangler-fig pattern. Redis powered query caching for faster search responses, backed by Celery for asynchronous task processing.
On LEGO Atlas, the product's backbone is an ETL pipeline orchestrated by Temporal for durable workflows, pulling from multiple internal LEGO systems — the most complex being a SAP Galaxy deployment accessed via OData. Redis served as the caching layer.
Across both products, built a Databricks-powered analytics tier using a medallion architecture (bronze, silver, gold) to transform raw data into business-ready datasets for product and user analytics. Integrated with other LEGO domains through Pulsar-based event-driven pub/sub, replacing cron-based API polling with reactive flows.