The Challenge
Fishbowl’s existing platform was a collection of aging legacy systems — brittle, expensive to maintain, and losing money. The company needed a complete rebuild to survive. Not a refactor. Not a migration. A ground-up rewrite of the entire SaaS platform while keeping paying customers live.
I joined as one of three core engineers tasked with making that happen.
Approach
We designed the new platform around an event-driven microservices architecture using Symfony and RabbitMQ — with retry mechanisms, dead-letter queues, and real-time integrations with POS systems like NCR Aloha, Zuppler, and OLO. On the frontend, we built 8 customer-facing Vue 3 / TypeScript applications managed in a Turborepo monorepo.
The goal wasn’t just to replace what existed — it was to build something that could win enterprise clients the old platform never could.
Key Contributions
Platform-wide authentication and payments. Built OAuth SSO serving 5,000+ users, OTP-based loyalty verification for 84,000+ active members, and multi-provider payment processing integrating Stripe, Square, and Checkout.com.
SOC 2 compliance. Worked directly with the CTO to achieve SOC 2 certification — the compliance milestone that unlocked enterprise contracts with Landry’s, Lettuce Entertain You, and Raising Cane’s across 1,200+ brands.
Performance optimization. Improved system performance by 45% through caching strategies, query optimization, and consolidating services into a Symfony 7.3 API monorepo. Identified bottlenecks through profiling and fixed them systematically rather than guessing.
Technology selection and mentorship. Selected core platform technologies including Turborepo, Vitest, and Playwright. Established the testing and CI/CD infrastructure used across all applications. Mentored engineers on architecture patterns and best practices.
AI integration. Integrated OpenAI APIs for customer engagement insights and automated data analysis, giving restaurant operators actionable intelligence from their guest data.
Impact
The platform rewrite directly contributed to Fishbowl’s turnaround from annual losses to profitability. The company now serves 430+ restaurant clients — including nationally recognized brands — across 5,500+ store locations. The SOC 2 certification and enterprise-ready architecture opened doors that were previously closed, and the platform’s reliability and feature set ultimately contributed to the company’s acquisition.