Khai Nguyen
GitHubLinkedIn

CoStar Group

Multi-channel Messaging System

Backend messaging workflows supporting communication between apartment communities and residents on Apartments.com and real estate agents and prospective home buyers on Homes.com.

  • REST APIs
  • Background services
  • AWS VPC
  • Kafka pub/sub exposure
  • Service-oriented architecture
Focus
Backend, Distributed Systems, Real Estate, AWS

Overview

Resident and community communication required backend workflows that could accept requests through stable APIs and continue processing work asynchronously across services.

What I Did

I designed and implemented the REST API and background-service components supporting those messaging workflows within the Apartments.com product environment.

  • Separated request-facing API behavior from background processing.
  • Deployed the service components within an AWS-hosted VPC.
  • Worked with publish/subscribe patterns on Kafka-based infrastructure for asynchronous communication between services.
  • Supported the service as part of a larger marketplace product and engineering organization.

Engineering Decisions

My Kafka experience in this project was at the application and pub/sub pattern level. I do not present it as deep ownership of Kafka operations, partitioning, or cluster design.

Outcome

The system enabled resident and community messaging workflows within Apartments.com. Message volume and user-impact metrics are not available in the retained source material, so the result is presented qualitatively.