Qu: Kitchen Display System

Qu is a restaurant technology company headquartered in Arlington, Virginia, powering enterprise chains across the US with its Unified Commerce platform. Orders reach those kitchens from every channel at once: point of sale, kiosk, drive-through and online. The Kitchen Display System (KDS) is the mission-critical product that routes each of them to kitchen staff in real time, replacing paper tickets and legacy display systems.

I joined Qu in 2025 as Senior Frontend Engineer, working remotely, and I lead the development of the KDS frontend: a high-performance, always-on display that runs on Qu's Qube™ edge hardware. It is the role I moved to after leading the Sky Airlines booking platform, and the work is ongoing.

The system is designed for environments where reliability is non-negotiable. Triple redundancy and an offline mode keep orders flowing even during internet outages, contributing to the platform's 99.997% uptime SLA. Each order lands on screen as a ticket with its number, a running timer, how it is served (dine in, take out, delivery, catering) and where it came from, with every item and modifier listed beneath it. The KDS adapts dynamically to each brand's menu structure, kitchen routing rules and display preferences, all managed centrally through Qu's platform without on-site configuration.

The hard parts are sub-second order rendering over a low-latency WebSocket stream, bump-time tracking so kitchen teams can monitor throughput and speed of service, and deep integration with Qu's order-ready notification pipeline. The frontend is TypeScript throughout, with WebSockets for the live order stream, REST APIs around it, and the edge computing model that lets a kitchen keep working when the connection drops.

The KDS is in production as part of Qu's platform, next to the point of sale, the self-order kiosks and the operator dashboard pictured in the gallery, and it remains my current work.