Russia's largest marketplace, Amazon-scale for Eastern Europe. The business model is built on reselling logistics capacity and monetizing seller placement across the platform.
Work
Warehouse Search Engine
OZON Tech07/2021 – 07/2023
200M
Items indexed
<5 sec
Search latency
Show:
Enabled warehouse staff to search across 200 million items in under 5 seconds, speeding up order picking at scale.
What happens when a picker searches
Compare a cached search, an uncached one, and how a catalog change reaches the index.
1/4Warehouse staff
terminal on the warehouse floor
A picker types a SKU — in Cyrillic or Latin, e.g. "БОЛТ М8" or "bolt m8".
Prometheus and Grafana track P50/P95/P99 latency, cache hit rate and Kafka consumer lag; Jaeger traces individual queries.
Integrated barcode scanner hardware with a real-time point-update service in OZON's returns zone, cutting manual data-entry — saving €86,000 while giving warehouse ops a scalable foundation for return-processing throughput as order volume grew. Still in use today.
Why the point-update service was the real bet
The barcode scanners themselves weren't the hard part — routing them through a shared service instead of wiring each one into a single app was. Drag the slider to see why that choice matters as load grows.
Drag the slider to change user count.
Concurrent users10,000
Vertical (1 machine)
€11,000
Bare-metal XL
Horizontal (N machines)
€1,360
34 commodity nodes
At this load, horizontal scaling costs 8.1× less than the single machine that would be needed to match it.
That's the real strategic payoff of this project: the old setup wired each barcode scanner directly into one legacy app, so shipping a new interface would have meant buying new scanner hardware. Routing scans through a shared point-update service decoupled the two — new terminals and app interfaces plug into the same backend, which scales out with commodity nodes instead of needing an ever-bigger central server.