Alaska Airlines — Custom Staffbase Engineering for 30K+ Employees

Overview

Alaska Air Group operates a large internal employee platform on Staffbase used across frontline and corporate teams. The platform supports internal communications, operational updates, content discovery, and employee engagement workflows in an environment where reliability and clarity matter.

I built and maintained custom production-grade Staffbase plugins and widgets running inside Team AAG, the employee platform used across the organization.

Scope of engagement

End-to-end engineering across multiple Staffbase-based products, including enterprise search, bulletin acknowledgement flows, alerts, employee recognition, gamified training, and shared UI infrastructure.

What I owned

• Owned delivery of multiple custom Staffbase widgets and plugins running in production on Alaska Air Group's employee platform.
• Built a custom Elasticsearch-backed search experience for internal content discovery across the platform.
• Implemented acknowledgement and bulletin workflows for employee communications with action-oriented UX.
• Replaced a legacy PowerApps recognition workflow with a Staffbase-integrated product that processed 11,050 shoutouts and 14,210 likes by September 24, 2026.
• Solved platform-specific mobile navigation and deep-linking issues inside the Staffbase app environment.
• Managed API integration changes, migration work, and production fixes across evolving Staffbase platform dependencies.
• Built shared React and TypeScript infrastructure reused across multiple production widgets.
• Handled live production debugging and reliability work across frontend, integration, and platform layers.

Selected systems

• Smart Search — Custom Elasticsearch-backed search widget for internal content discovery, with platform-aware filtering and mobile deep-linking support.
• Shoutouts — Staffbase-integrated peer-to-peer recognition product with submission flows, feed, history views, push and email notifications, and PeopleSoft-backed recipient selection.
• Bulletin Acknowledgement Widget — Action-oriented communications widget helping employees surface, review, and acknowledge required internal updates.

Enterprise search and information access

One of the core workstreams was a custom search experience designed to improve how employees find internal pages, articles, and other platform content. The widget used Elasticsearch-backed search flows combined with Staffbase APIs to surface relevant results while respecting platform visibility rules and content access constraints.

This work included search UX, integration behavior, reliability improvements, and handling platform-specific edge cases, particularly around mobile navigation and deep linking inside the Staffbase app environment.

Employee communications workflows

I built communication-focused widgets designed to make important internal updates more actionable. This included bulletin acknowledgement flows, content filtering, multi-channel support, and UX improvements intended to reduce friction for employees consuming required communications.

In practice, this meant building interfaces that helped teams see what required action, what had already been reviewed, and what information still needed attention, all within the company's core employee platform.

Recognition and engagement systems

A major initiative was a Staffbase recognition system with submission, feed, and history widgets backed by a separate application designed to replace a legacy PowerApps-based workflow. The system included shoutout submission flows, feed experiences, history views, email and push notification paths, and directory-driven recipient selection backed by Staffbase and PeopleSoft user data.

I built and maintained a gamified training experience tied to an internal loyalty-program rollout, including leaderboard behavior, user-data handling, and recurring scoring-related workflows.

Technical complexity

The engineering challenge was not just building UI. The work required operating inside Staffbase's plugin model, integrating with multiple APIs and identity flows, handling mobile WebView constraints, working through platform changes, and shipping functionality that remained stable under real production usage.

Several systems depended on careful handling of authentication, tenant-aware routing, session-sensitive API behavior, external data integration, and long-tail edge cases that only appear in live enterprise environments.

Selected engineering wins

• Shipped production AI content moderation (Gemini) for the recognition product, designed fail-open so an AI outage never blocks an employee: retry with exponential backoff, and a 42-case evaluation suite made concurrent, from about two minutes to about 14 seconds, so a model change can be checked before it ships.
• Recovered about 11,000 users stranded on an old directory snapshot after full sync timed out on every run for a 64,000-user tenant; used keyset pagination, 1,000-row upserts and limited fetch concurrency, then diagnosed a Postgres 40P01 deadlock between concurrent runs.
• Replaced notification dispatch that lost jobs on pod restarts with a Postgres queue and Google Cloud Tasks: OIDC-authenticated at-least-once delivery, deterministic deduplication and five-minute reconciliation.
• Drove the security-first authentication design from kickoff: evaluated widget, plugin, and hybrid auth models with explicit risk framing, and resolved a mobile OAuth blocker in direct collaboration with Staffbase engineering.
• Fixed an unreproducible iOS tap-swallowing bug affecting airline crews by bypassing framework event delegation with direct DOM listeners — labeled transparently as a blind fix, validated by the client the same day.

Platform scale

The Team AAG platform supporting 30,000+ employees reached 99% adoption and 75% weekly engagement a year after launch, according to Staffbase. Its custom search, communications, recognition and training products served that workforce.

Outcome

The result was a set of custom internal products for content discovery, bulletin acknowledgement, peer recognition, and training, running inside Team AAG. The work extended the employee platform beyond the base Staffbase product through tailored, business-specific software.

From a delivery perspective, this was high-trust product engineering in a live enterprise environment: building systems that had to work reliably for a large distributed workforce, across desktop and mobile, with minimal room for failure.