Case Study - A first outside API for a restaurant loyalty network, kept separate from the traffic that already paid the bills.
A loyalty and payments network, live in well over a thousand restaurants, had never let an outside developer in. Two engineers built a separate gateway, sign-in for outside apps, rate limits, and a small sample app in fourteen weeks.
- Client
- Loyalty network
- Year
- Service
- API, infrastructure
Overview
The client runs loyalty and payments for restaurants, live in well over a thousand locations. Nothing on the platform was built for a developer who did not work there.
The job was the first outside door: sign-in an outside app can complete, limits on what that app can see, a quota, and traffic that cannot take the existing live system down with it.
Two senior engineers worked at the same time for fourteen weeks. One owned the separation and the surrounding infrastructure. The other owned the application: the sign-in flows, the public read endpoints, and a small sample app a developer could run. The existing stack stayed. We added an entrance. We did not replace the system.
The result was a live path for outside callers, fully split from the company’s own traffic, with key management and read-only restaurant data the company was willing to publish.
What we did
- Third-party sign-in
- Gateway and quotas
- Traffic isolation
- Public read endpoints
- A developer proof app
- Door to handoff
- 14 weeks
- Engineers
- 2
- Locations already live
- 1,000+