From zero to $2.7M+ in marketplace volume: LaLiga Golazos

Dapper Labs was in the middle of a major internal shift. Existing marketplaces like NBA Top Shot and NFL All Day had been built independently, despite sharing a lot of the same functionality. That created duplication, friction, and long-term maintenance pain.

At the same time, LaLiga wanted to launch Golazos quickly, at scale, and without compromising reliability. This would be the first marketplace built entirely on the new consolidated core-services stack, making it both a product launch and an architectural proving ground.

The backend team for LaLiga was small, just two engineers, and the system needed to handle real launch traffic, payments, on-chain events, and marketplace operations from day one.

I led the backend effort for the LaLiga Golazos launch while working as a Senior Software Engineer on Dapper Labs' Core Services team.

I was responsible for designing and building the backend systems that powered the marketplace, including:

• •Authentication and login flows
• •Payment and checkout flows
• •Marketplace operations and listings
• •On-chain event ingestion from Flow
• •Cadence contract integration
• •Database schemas and data models
• •Performance metrics and observability

LaLiga Golazos was the first real-world test of the new shared core-services architecture, so a big part of the work was making sure the abstractions actually held up under real product requirements.

Despite the small backend team, we had the platform fully operational within three months, with another two months spent hardening the system through load testing, security reviews, bug fixes, and product-driven refinements ahead of launch.