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SYSTEMS ARCHITECTURE

Summary: Designed and built the end-to-end architecture of a large hospitality-commerce platform organized around a single front-controller request engine, a stateless API tier backed by an external session/cache layer, strict multi-environment routing, and tenant isolation enforced from the data layer upward.

Request Engine

Description: Architected a unified request pipeline where every HTTP request (~1,000-line dispatcher) flows through one entry point and a strict, ordered lifecycle.

Pipeline

• Edge rewrite of all non-static traffic to a single dispatcher.
• Bootstrap of platform primitives (error handling, sanitization, DB, response, security).
• URL decomposition into version / domain / endpoint / format / method segments.
• Mandatory-parameter enforcement and global input sanitization.
• API-key resolution with auto-detected key type and session load.
• CSRF validation for session-type requests (environment-relaxed for non-prod).
• Assembly of a single request-context object threaded through all business logic.
• A numbered authorization cascade (folder existence, IP restriction, role gates, tenant access).
• Per-endpoint parameter whitelisting before the handler ever sees input.
• Version-aware handler dispatch (path-routing for legacy, method-routing for modern).
• Multi-format response serialization from a single response-builder structure.

Design Wins

• One choke point for auth, sanitization, and audit, no endpoint can bypass it.
• Handlers stay thin: they orchestrate a shared business-logic library rather than re-implementing plumbing.
• New endpoints are declared as a small, uniform file set (security + routing + handler + parameter docs).

Response Contract

Description: Designed a single response-builder abstraction that serializes into many wire formats based on a URL path segment, with a consistent success/http/message envelope.

Formats

• json
• xml
• csv
• xls
• pdf
• php-serialized
• js

Features

• Uniform envelope: success flag, HTTP code, message, execution time, data payload.
• Automatic content-type negotiation per format.
• Optional response-tree trimming for bandwidth-constrained clients.
• Reflected-origin CORS with credentialed session support.

Scalability

Description: Architected the API tier to be stateless so any node can serve any request, with session and hot data pushed to an external cache layer.

Mechanisms

• Session context stored in an external cache (with durable fallback rebuild).
• Read/write/analytics database tiers to keep read traffic off the write primary.
• Dual-tier response caching (in-memory cache + short-lived file cache) with explicit bypass.
• Asynchronous job runners that decouple slow external sync from the request path.
• Persistent per-request connection pooling keyed by database code.

Environments

Description: Designed a three-axis environment model (server identity, logic context, database target) so the same codebase runs safely across production, UAT, staging, and hybrid sandbox modes.

Axes

Server Identity: Physical environment identity set at bootstrap.

Logic Context: Controls which payment keys, webhooks, and outbound side-effects are live.

Database Target: Selects the physical datastore, independent of logic context.

Notable

• A hybrid sandbox mode: production logic paths + non-production data + test payment keys.
• Environment-aware absolute path resolution so staging code can never write the production store.
• Per-developer environment slots with hostname allowlisting.

Multi Tenancy

Description: Designed tenant isolation as a first-class, hierarchical concern spanning system → account → venue → feature scopes.

Mechanisms

• Hierarchical access model resolved into the session context at login.
• Per-request authorization checks against the tenant access matrix.
• Account-scoped API keys isolating multi-property operators.
• Tenant scoping carried all the way into analytics data shares (see COMP-06).

Extensibility

Description: Designed the platform to expose multiple protocol surfaces from the same core.

Surfaces

• Versioned REST (v1 / v2 / v4) with independent routing and auth conventions per version.
• A GraphQL surface on selected endpoints as a REST alternative.
• A Model Context Protocol (MCP) surface that hijacks the dispatcher for AI-tool traffic.

Cross Reference

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