Pre- and Post-IPO Infrastructure Scalability - Warby Parker

Client Background

Warby Parker is a digitally native eyewear company headquartered in New York City, known for redefining prescription glasses, contact lenses, and sunglasses through a vertically integrated, omnichannel model. Founded online, the company later expanded aggressively into physical retail and today operates 160+ retail locations across the United States and Canada alongside a high-scale ecommerce platform.

In August 2020, Warby Parker raised $245M across Series F and G rounds at a $3B valuation, supported by leading institutional investors including Tiger Global Management, T. Rowe Price, General Catalyst, D1 Capital Partners, and Durable Capital.

Warby Parker went public via a direct listing on the New York Stock Exchange in September 2021, entering a post-IPO growth phase marked by rapid retail expansion, heightened reliability requirements, and public-market operating discipline. (Warby Parker operates under its parent company, Jand, Inc..)

Objective

To support Warby Parker’s post-IPO growth by leading architecture, infrastructure, and DevOps strategy across ecommerce and retail—enabling scale, resilience, and innovation while addressing historical technical debt and pandemic-era operational complexity.

Challenges Faced

• Scaling ecommerce and retail systems under public-company expectations
  
• Innovating on top of legacy technical debt without disrupting growth
  
• Supporting consistent SLAs across 160+ retail locations
• Maintaining uptime, performance, and reliability across distributed teams
  
• Implementing modern DevOps and SRE practices during the global pandemic
  

Our Approach

Phase 1: Post-IPO Architecture & Infrastructure Leadership

Avion provided senior architecture and infrastructure leadership with deep ecommerce and retail expertise. This role aligned executive priorities, engineering teams, and operational stakeholders—ensuring technology decisions supported long-term growth and public-market rigor.

Phase 2: Cloud-Native Platform & DevOps Modernization

We designed and implemented a modern, scalable infrastructure stack, including:

• AWS-driven cloud computing frameworks
  
• Kubernetes- and microservices-based architecture
  
• Full engineering stack across GoLang, Python, GraphQL, and AWS
  
• Production-grade CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure-as-code using AWS CDK
  

Phase 3: Site Reliability Engineering & Operational Excellence

To ensure resilience at scale, Avion implemented enterprise-grade SRE practices:

• Reliability engineering across EKS, ECS, RDS, and DynamoDB
  
• SLO/SLI frameworks, error budgeting, and observability
  
• Incident response automation and post-mortem workflows
  
• SLA governance across ecommerce and retail systems
• This approach enabled Warby Parker to continue rapid innovation while maintaining reliability through unprecedented operational stress.

Results

• Delivered post-IPO architecture and infrastructure planning across ecommerce and 160+ retail locations
• Enabled sustainable, scalable DevOps systems supporting omnichannel growth
  
• Implemented dedicated Site Reliability Engineering frameworks
  
• Established full-scale release engineering with SLO/SLI reporting and error budgets
  
• Improved software automation, incident response, and operational resilience
  
• Supported continued growth and stability throughout the global pandemic
  

Feedback

“Warby Parker’s leadership was open to objective outside counsel focused on what was best for the brand at scale. While post-IPO change management is never easy, the organization took decisive steps to build a technology environment capable of supporting long-term growth. We’re proud to remain part of that roadmap.”

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