Pet Alert: lost pet recovery at national scale
Aimen Houalef
Pet Alert is one of the largest lost-pet recovery networks in Europe. When an animal goes missing, the platform has minutes rather than hours to get that alert in front of the right people in the right place.
The migration
The platform outgrew its original data layer. I moved ten million records out of MongoDB into the new backend using Python sanitization and chunked batches, verified by count at every stage, with zero records lost.
The posting engine
Alerts have to reach more than thirty regional Facebook pages, each with its own audience and posting constraints. I built a custom queue handling time-based scheduling, retries on failure, and per-page rate awareness so the network never trips Meta's limits during a surge.
Matching and integrations
Geolocation matching connects sightings to open alerts by proximity, and the platform integrates with police and local authority workflows so reports move through the right channels.
Outcome
More than 140,000 animals have been reunited with their families through the platform, which has been running continuously since 2020.
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Posted Feb 10, 2024
Ten million records migrated with zero loss, and a posting engine reaching 30+ pages. The platform behind 140,000+ pets reunited with their families.
