A close friend of mine is working as a backend engineer at a popular Indian matrimony site. When he first told me, I laughed, “So basically you debug weddings for a living?”. He laughed too, but then added. “You joke, but it’s the emotionally volatile platform I’ve ever seen or worked on.”
And he wasn’t kidding about it.
Matrimony sites might sound like quaint cultural relics from the pre-Tinder era, but under the hood, they’re some of the most demanding platforms out there. Think millions of users, high-frequency searches, privacy-sensitive data, and deeply complex filters: caste, sub-caste, income, height, horoscope, vegetarian or not, NRI status, and sometimes even “fairness.”
While I’m juggling EC2 instances and Terraform scripts, my friend is building matchmaking logic that decides whether someone’s mother swipes right. And that’s not even the weird part.
He told me the biggest traffic spikes happen on Sunday mornings. “That’s when parents take over.” Most of the users aren’t even the brides or grooms themselves. It’s their parents logging in, shortlisting matches, and sending requests that sound more like interview invitations than date proposals.
He once had to handle a production bug where a parent was able to shortlist the same person twice, and chaos ensued because they thought it meant divine confirmation. I’ve dealt with broken CI pipelines before, but never one that accidentally got someone proposed to twice.
And privacy? Huge issue. Users want to be discoverable but not by neighbors, colleagues, or distant relatives. So he built features like “hide my profile from this city” or “don’t show to people with the same last name.” I’m out here masking IP addresses; he’s out here masking identities from nosy aunties.
But what stuck with me was something he said over coffee last month: “When I push code, someone’s mom might cry, and someone else might get married.”
That’s kind of beautiful.
Most of us in DevOps or backend roles build systems that serve users. But at a matrimony site, the user experience is intertwined with emotion, culture, and expectation. It’s high stakes not because of scale, but because every profile is someone’s hope.
It made me think: maybe love does need load balancing.