BnbMeHomes: Bringing Engineering In-House

BnbMeHomes manages luxury short-term rentals across Dubai — a business where bookings, pricing, guest messaging and owner reporting all run through software, but where none of that software was actually theirs. The entire technology function sat with an external vendor.

That arrangement had a predictable shape: delivery moved at the vendor's pace, nobody inside the company owned the architecture, and there was no in-house technical judgement to call on when a decision needed making. The business wanted engineering under its own roof, and needed someone to run that transition without stalling the platform people were using every day.

I joined as Tech Lead, with a remit spanning backend and frontend development, system architecture, vendor and integration management, and hiring:

• Platform Audit: Started with a full technical audit of the codebase and architecture — the Express backend, the React “Nerve Centre” internal tool, the Next.js public site, and the shared database layer underneath them.
• CRM Integration: Designed and implemented the Zoho–Nerve Centre integration, from design document through to rollout, connecting sales pipeline data to the internal operations tooling.
• Guest Messaging: Reactivated and integrated Laya AI for guest messaging, and untangled the Respond.io messaging issues sitting behind it.
• Data Integrity: Ran the Silver data-validation initiative for financial data, mediating between the data-sync and validation-logic teams, and built a Go booking-data validator CLI to catch discrepancies before they reached finance.
• Observability: Stood up a Docker/Prometheus/Loki/Grafana stack so the team could see what the platform was actually doing, plus a Microsoft Teams Go webhook bot delivering CSV booking reports where people already worked.
• Internal Tooling: Built MissionControl, a Filament v3 admin panel for internal reporting, and set up a MySQL staging replica from production — resolving broken views, missing stored procedures and generated-column conflicts in the process.
• Customer-Facing Work: Built the FIFA World Cup 2026 landing page in React, later migrated to Next.js, with Hellotickets affiliate tracking through Tapfiliate.

The engagement did what it was meant to do — it gave the business technical ownership of its own platform:

• Engineering Moved In-House: The transition off the external vendor ran on a 90-day technology roadmap, Gantt chart and a set of PRDs and BRDs I produced, covering the Bookings Report, Revenue Dashboard, SKU structure and the Nerve Centre platform itself.
• Team Built: Managed the outgoing vendor's team down while onboarding a backend developer onto the in-house side.
• Trustworthy Financial Data: The validation work gave finance a booking revenue picture they could rely on, with tooling to keep it that way.
• Clean Handoff: Closed with a full technical handoff to incoming CTO Alessio Bilato — covering messaging, the Zoho integration, the World Cup landing page, the DigitalOcean Spaces image migration and an outstanding owner-app calendar bug. The point of the role was to make itself unnecessary.