Employment work
Kirin WellWa
Backend lead for Kirin’s corporate wellness platform, from the first design decisions through rewards, checkout, and the integrations around them.
Context
Kirin WellWa is a corporate wellness platform for Japanese companies. Employees build daily health habits in an app, while company HR teams follow participation and results. Healthy actions earn points that can be spent in Kirin’s e-commerce store, affiliated stores, and vending machines. I have been the backend lead at Brain Station 23 since the start. The product serves more than 20,000 monthly active users.
Problem
A wellness program is easy to ignore unless people can see progress and companies can tell whether behavior is changing. It also has to stay trustworthy: each company sees only its own people, and points and payments have to match what an employee earned and spent.
My role
I led the backend from the beginning and made most of the design and architecture decisions. I built the complex and critical parts myself, including the connections between the employee app, company tools, rewards, and payments. I supervised every integration and reviewed point and payment behavior in detail.
Constraints
The platform combines tenant isolation, health-program participation, rewards, commerce, and payment integrations. The backend has to preserve a trustworthy point balance while several applications and external systems act on the same customer journey.
Reasoning
Habits, company challenges, and purchases all change the same point balance. I treated rewards and checkout as the paths that had to be explicit, so a later integration could not quietly break what an employee had earned or spent. The employee app, company tools, and store run as separate parts, while people, points, and payments stay in one shared record.
Outcome
The platform is live for subscribing companies and their employees: daily habits, company programs, and a rewards path through the store and payments. My ownership is the backend decisions behind that loop and the review of how points and payments behave.
Reflection
The most important architecture decisions were the ones that made points, purchases, and integration behavior explicit. Those boundaries let the product grow without making customer balances depend on hidden assumptions between systems.