Headless Commerce
at B2B Scale

The commerce graph had everything — orders, inventory, customers, returns, shipments — but support tools were stitched together against legacy REST endpoints that assumed a shopper, not an agent. Latency was fine for a product page and brutal for a ticket queue.

Reps needed the full order context — the order, its line items, shipment status, return history, the customer record — and they were assembling it by hand, tabbing between systems mid-call. The headless Apollo/GraphQL layer put that data within reach; my job on the React side was cutting the number of steps it took to surface it. No grand architecture story — just the order context, on one screen, in fewer moves.

• Apollo + GraphQL as the read-path for all B2B tooling
• Tens of thousands of concurrent requests at 99.9% uptime on the B2B support surface
• Redux for local UI state that shouldn't round-trip the server

The polyglot stack underneath — Scala services, PostgreSQL, Kubernetes, Terraform — didn't need to change. The GraphQL layer was the translation.

The portal itself was deliberately boring. Support teams don't want cleverness; they want the right data in the right place, and they want it now. We mapped the three workflows that ate most of their day, and my job in each one was the same discipline: count the clicks, cut the clicks.

• Order management
• Returns processing
• Escalations

The win we could measure was ticket resolution time: 35% faster, driven by fewer tab switches and fewer round trips. The win we couldn't measure was morale. Reps who'd been apologizing to customers for software stopped apologizing.

I was at UA for eleven months. The goal was never to ship my components — it was to ship the patterns the next engineer would copy. Two things carried the most weight:

• Component API standards — prop shapes, event names, accessibility defaults, documented in one place and enforced with prop validation on every component API
• A Figma-to-Storybook design-to-code workflow, built with the design team — so handoff started from one shared source instead of two drifting versions
• TypeScript-first patterns — junior engineers pairing on real tickets, not on toy examples, with a specific focus on making 'strict mode' feel like a productivity gain rather than a tax

When I left, feature rollouts were faster because the next person didn't have to relitigate how a form behaves or what a modal header looks like. That's the part of the job that's invisible until you miss it.