Case study · Food & retail
Data and apps for a 500-store coffee chain
Pickup Coffee is one of the fastest-growing coffee chains in the Philippines and is expanding into Mexico. Working at Shuru Technologies, I first built its data platform and then worked on the backends of its three apps.
- Role
- Product Engineer (Backend), Shuru
- Scale
- 500+ stores, thousands of daily orders
- Impact
- 30% lower API latency, 40% less DB load
- Stack
- Node.js, PostgreSQL, Airflow, BigQuery
01 The challenge
Fast growth meant data scattered across systems and APIs that slowed down under load. Marketing needed reliable numbers, and the apps needed to stay fast as order volume grew.
02 What I built
- Apache Airflow pipelines moving data from Google Cloud Storage into BigQuery, and Metabase dashboards for the marketing team.
- Backend work for the customer ordering app, the barista tablet app used in stores, and the back office for menus and pricing.
- Microservices for orders, wallet, vouchers, promotions and stamps, tuned with query optimisation and Redis caching.
- OpenTelemetry + Jaeger tracing across 5+ services so issues are found and fixed faster.
- The referral program end to end: RFC, flows, campaign APIs, TalonOne integration and queues for rewards.
03 Results
- 30% lower API latency
- 40% less database load and 60% fewer slow queries
- Debugging time roughly halved with distributed tracing
- One source of truth for marketing in BigQuery and Metabase
04 Stack
- Node.js
- Express
- PostgreSQL
- Cloud SQL
- Redis
- Bull
- Apache Airflow
- BigQuery
- Metabase
- OpenTelemetry
- Kubernetes
- GCP
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