Etsaw · Product · 2022–2024
Circl8 Marketplace
A B2B marketplace and reverse-logistics program closing the recycled-plastics loop — shipped and used over two years.
- React
- Flask
- Typesense
- PostgreSQL
The problem
Recycled plastics move through an opaque chain of buyers, recyclers, and logistics. Circl8 put buyers, recyclers, orders, and analytics in one product — plus “Takeback,” a reverse-logistics program for post-consumer material.
What I built
Joined as a frontend engineer building the React marketplace pixel-perfect from Figma, and grew into backend services: Flask microservice APIs, database schema design, search (Typesense), and performance work. Two years on one commercial multi-user product — the unglamorous, formative kind of shipping: migrations, edge cases, real users.
Decisions worth noting
- Marketplaces are edge-case machines. Order states, partial fulfillment, and actor permissions taught me more about defensive schema design than any greenfield build.
- Search is a product feature, not infrastructure. Moving filtering into Typesense changed how buyers found material — and how the frontend was structured.
- Pixel-perfect from Figma is a discipline, not busywork. Building the React frontend to match designs exactly forced a component structure clean enough that growing from there into backend services and schema design didn’t mean fighting the frontend to keep up.
My role
Full-stack SWE at Etsaw (remote US startup), Feb 2022 – Jan 2024. Employer-owned product, so this is a case study with staging-data screenshots — no source. I also built the backend of Britenote AI (open-source LLM integration) and frontend work on BriteCode AI, a ChatGPT-style coding assistant, in the same period.