Unifying a bifurcated ingestion pipeline

For years, content flowed into our catalog through two parallel ingestion paths — one legacy, one modern — each maintained by a different generation of the team. Every new feature meant building it twice, or worse, building it once and quietly letting the other path drift.

The unification wasn’t a rewrite. It was a 12-engineer cross-org tiger team methodically routing traffic, title by title, onto the single path while the legacy system kept serving in parallel. We instrumented both paths so a regression on either was visible within minutes, not days.

Nine months in, the unified path carries 100% of net-new partner content. The legacy path is still there, mid-decommission, but every title added since has only ever touched one codebase — and that’s the part that actually saves the years of tech debt from coming back.