Zara (Inditex)

The challenge

The Zara app product team needed to scale its iOS capacity with a senior profile capable of operating in an extremely high-scale environment — hundreds of millions of users, frequent releases, and a shared codebase across multiple product teams. The reinforcement had to onboard quickly into a cross-cutting team, in which every change impacts the whole app and all product lines in parallel. The role demanded demonstrable experience in large-scale iOS architecture, verifiable through the client's own technical architecture interviews prior to onboarding.

The solution

AtalayaSoft assigned Francisco José García Navarro as Senior iOS Architect, integrated into the product team. After passing the architecture interviews, he took on the Tech Lead role of one of the cross-cutting teams — a team whose work impacted the whole app and all product teams in parallel.

Under a confidentiality agreement with Inditex, specific features cannot be disclosed. The scope of work, described at a high level, was organised around two fronts:

1. Senior iOS development on the cross-cutting team

As senior iOS reinforcement first and Tech Lead later, Francisco contributed to production development on the app:

• Development of new features on the shared codebase of the cross-cutting team.
• Technical and evolutive maintenance of the existing architecture.
• Resolution of functional and technical incidents in critical e-commerce flows.

2. Code reviews and cross-cutting quality

Because of the very nature of a cross-cutting team — whose decisions affect every product team across the app — code reviews are a critical part of day-to-day work. Francisco was part of that continuous flow, validating incoming changes with a focus on code quality, maintainability and Swift best practices from a global app-architecture perspective.

Technical discipline applied

Clean Architecture

Work on the cross-cutting team's codebase followed Clean Architecture principles: clear separation between layers (presentation, domain, data), framework independence, and dependencies pointing inward to the domain core. This ensures that external changes — UI updates, libraries or services — do not ripple into the critical e-commerce business logic.

SOLID

SOLID principles were applied both when writing new code and during code reviews: single responsibility per component, extensibility without modification, dependency inversion and injection to enable testing, and segregated interfaces that reflect the domain language.

Testing

Systematic coverage with unit tests over business logic and behaviour validation on key flows. Testing was treated not as an accessory layer but as part of the design: testable architecture from the first commit, with testability used as an explicit criterion during code reviews.

Continuous Integration (CI)

Work governed by continuous integration pipelines running tests, static analysis and quality gates on every pull request. Keeping the main branch always green is critical on an app with frequent releases and multiple teams contributing in parallel to the same codebase.

iOS accessibility

Systematic application of native iOS accessibility APIs — semantic labels and traits for VoiceOver, focus order on shopping flows, and Dynamic Type support — as an integral part of the day-to-day work, not as an afterthought. This is exactly the kind of discipline the European Accessibility Act (EAA) now mandates for retail apps operating in the European Union.