Polestar — Global EV E-Commerce Platform
Led engineering teams building the vehicle configurator, pre-owned car, and pre-configured car modules for 15+ international markets. Defined MACH architecture, governed technical standards, and bridged digital to physical with a first-of-its-kind tabletop configurator for retail outlets.
The Situation
Polestar, the Swedish EV brand, needed a digital platform capable of supporting complex vehicle configuration journeys, pre-owned car listings, and pre-configured packages across 15+ international markets — each with unique languages, pricing, regulatory requirements, and regional content strategies.
The platform needed to perform at elite levels — Core Web Vitals, accessibility (WCAG 2.1 AA), SEO (SSR, hreflang, structured data), and resilience across distributed teams in multiple time zones.
My Role
- Defined the platform architecture: MACH-aligned micro-frontend strategy on AWS with React, TypeScript, GraphQL, .NET microservices, and DynamoDB
- Governed technical standards through ADRs across squads — with full budget accountability for tooling, infrastructure, and vendor contracts
- Set engineering KPIs, testing strategy (Vitest, Jest, RTL), and observability standards (Sentry)
- Owned on-call rotation and SLA commitments for the production platform
- Established incident management: severity definitions, response runbooks, and post-mortem culture
- Ran staff engineer programme — paired engineers with architectural ownership and technical mentorship
The Architecture
The platform used a MACH-aligned micro-frontend architecture — each major feature area (Configurator, Pre-Owned, Pre-Configured) deployed independently with dynamic feature toggling for region-specific deployments.
React + TypeScript + GraphQL + Apollo — with a custom design system built to WCAG 2.1 AA. Reusable component libraries aligned to accessibility standards, enabling consistent UX across all 15+ markets without duplicating logic.
- Micro-frontends with dynamic feature toggling for rapid, region-specific deployments
- SSR for SEO — structured data, hreflang metadata, canonical URLs across markets
- Core Web Vitals optimised for global deployments with CDN edge caching
- Custom accessible design system with reusable component libraries
- GraphQL API contracts governed at boundaries — caching, authentication, performance strategies
Physical + Digital: The Tabletop Configurator
One of the most distinctive deliverables on this engagement was a touchscreen Tabletop Configurator for Polestar retail outlets — enabling customers to interactively configure vehicles at in-store stations, connecting the digital product platform directly to physical devices.
This was a first-of-its-kind experience in the EV retail space, requiring careful coordination between the web platform, device APIs, and the in-store hardware team.
Outcomes
- Platform live across 15+ international markets with market-specific feature flags and content
- ~35% reduction in design-to-delivery time through shared design system and reusable assets
- WCAG 2.1 AA compliance across all configurator flows and purchase journeys
- Improved DORA metrics: deployment frequency, lead time, and MTTR all in elite/high band
- Tabletop configurator deployed to Polestar retail outlets — digital to physical