Overview

Barn Owl is a loyalty and payments platform for restaurants, live in 1,000+ locations across major US cities. All API traffic was first-party, and the platform had no infrastructure for exposing APIs to third-party developers.

Cedar Labs was engaged to build the foundational infrastructure for Barn Owl's first external API platform. The platform needed to support OAuth 2.0-based user authentication, scoped data access, rate limiting, and complete traffic isolation from the existing production environment.

Over 14 weeks, two senior engineers worked in parallel — one focused on infrastructure and DevOps (Terraform, AWS), the other on backend application development (Spring Boot, Kotlin). The work was delivered across seven phases: traffic isolation and infrastructure, OAuth 2.0 authentication, authorization and scope enforcement, rate limiting and API key management, public endpoints, a developer POC mini-app, and final QA, hardening, and handoff.

The result was a production-ready 3P API platform, fully isolated from first-party traffic, with complete OAuth 2.0 flows, API key lifecycle management, and read-only public endpoints for restaurant data — all built on top of Barn Owl's existing stack with no rip-and-replace.

What we did

For privacy reasons, the client requested anonymizing the company name in this portfolio profile.