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. The Kitchen Display System (KDS) is a mission-critical product that routes incoming orders from every channel — POS, kiosk, drive-through, and online — directly to kitchen staff in real time, replacing paper tickets and legacy display systems.

As Senior Frontend Engineer, I lead the development of the KDS frontend, building a high-performance, always-on display that operates on Qu's Qube™ edge hardware. The system is designed for environments where reliability is non-negotiable: triple redundancy and offline mode ensure orders keep flowing even during internet outages, contributing to the platform's 99.997% uptime SLA.

Key challenges include sub-second order rendering with low-latency WebSocket streaming, bump-time tracking so kitchen teams can monitor throughput and speed of service, and deep integration with Qu's order-ready notification pipeline. The KDS adapts dynamically to each brand's menu structure, kitchen routing rules, and display preferences — all managed centrally through Qu's platform without requiring on-site configuration.