Loyalty

In-house loyalty replacing vendor lock-in; real-time checkout and admin control.

Role: Principal Engineer
Year: 2025
Scale: ~20k participants/season

Context & Goal

Replace third-party loyalty to cut SaaS cost and regain control over rules and data. Support real-time checkout, accurate balances, and admin workflows.

What I Built
  • Real-time loyalty at checkout with one-tap POS Apply to Cart.
  • Automates points accrual/redemption with idempotent writes and timezone-corrected history.
  • In-house admin console: balance/history views, profile-merge, manual adjustments, and audit trails.
  • Exports events to BigQuery + dbt for analytics without duplicating business logic.
Architecture at a Glance
Loyalty architecture diagram
Key Decisions & Tradeoffs
  • Postgres as source of truth; analytics in BigQuery to avoid logic drift.
  • Deterministic naming + DB constraints to prevent double counting.
  • URL-addressable admin flows for faster QA/support.
What I'd Improve Next
  • Rule templates for variable challenge windows and promotions.
  • Ops dashboard for scheduled tasks and cancellations.