Places — AI restaurant discovery for Dubai
A complete web experience around an existing AI recommendation engine.
- role
- Software Engineer
- duration
- 3 months
- team
- 2
- stack
- Angular · SCSS · AWS · Figma
“the engine was strong. the UI was missing.”
The problem
A capable AI engine for Dubai restaurant recommendations existed, but the only way to interact with it was an internal tool. Users never saw it. The business needed a real product surface.
The approach
Take the product from brief to production: requirements with the business team, design in Figma against the existing brand, implement in Angular + SCSS with a modular component system that adapted to the AI’s varied response shapes. Separate surface for business partnerships — their own page, form, and contact pipeline. Integrated with the existing AWS-hosted API without breaking any internal consumer.
The stack
Angular (custom Webpack) · SCSS with a token-driven theme · Figma for spec + prototyping · AWS API endpoints consumed via typed HTTP clients · cached search responses for perceived speed.
Reflection
I came in as an intern and ran the full cycle — requirements, design, implementation, integration, deploy. The result was a real product. The lesson was about trust: given end-to-end ownership, make it end-to-end good.