In 2017, I joined Metglobal, a major travel tech company with $350M+ in revenue, as Chief Technology Officer. My mission was clear: rebuild the core search and distribution engine to meet modern performance demands.

We were facing a bottleneck — not just in raw throughput, but in flexibility. Every change took too long to propagate, and scaling wasn’t linear. Here’s what we did — and what I learned.

🚀 Building a High-Performance Travel Search Engine

We rebuilt the search platform with:

  • Go as the service language
  • Bigtable as our low-latency storage layer
  • GRPC for fast inter-service communication

The result?

We hit 300,000 responses per minute, all under 300ms, using fewer than 20 VMs.
This brought a 90% drop in server costs and almost linear scaling.

It was the most performant backend I’d ever deployed.

🧠 The Hard Parts (and What I’d Change)

1. Bigtable is brilliant — but brutal without planning

Bigtable offered the speed we needed, but schema design was critical. When patterns shifted, re-architecting keys was painful.

If I were to do it again, I’d:

  • Add a caching layer earlier (even with low latency storage)
  • Abstract more query logic from table structure

2. Auto-SDK Generation Pays Off

We built an OAPI-based system that generated SDKs for different teams. It improved adoption and consistency across products.

Today, I’d go further:

  • Use Buf Connect or OpenAPI + Typescript SDKs directly
  • Treat internal APIs like products — with versioning, docs, and test harnesses

3. Rule Engines Must Be Fast and Flexible

We developed a product-level rule engine that adjusted prices and filters by hotel, room type, currency, provider, etc. It was powerful — but tuning it took deep domain alignment.

Now, I’d build this with:

  • Code-defined rules + low-code overrides
  • Integrated analytics to see the impact of each rule

📊 Impact Beyond Tech

The real win wasn’t just throughput.
It was how these decisions affected margin, market speed, and partner confidence.

Fast systems reduce retries, lower infrastructure bills, and increase the odds of conversion. In B2B travel, that matters more than ever.

🧭 What This Taught Me as a CTO

  • Performance alone isn’t enough. Performance that aligns with business strategy is.
  • Developer experience is key to scalability — SDKs, APIs, and documentation aren’t luxuries.
  • Building for throughput forces you to simplify smartly — and abstract wisely.

This project ultimately played a big role in the company’s acquisition by GoGlobal.
Today, those same principles shape the foundation of LodgingBase — the travel distribution platform I’m now building from scratch.

If you’re scaling a B2B system — in travel or otherwise — let’s connect. I’ve made all the mistakes already.