The problem
Staff incentives ran on manual gift-card purchases and emails that landed in spam. No audit trail, no scheduling, no way to know what was sent to whom.
The system
A rewards engine with balances, redemptions, and per-company rules, wired to a transactional email layer with authenticated sending, email-safe HTML rendering, and hosted assets — so operational email renders everywhere and is provable after the fact.
How it's built
- SendGrid Web API integration with SPF/DKIM-authenticated domains
- Template system rendering email-client-safe HTML; assets on public object storage
- Rewards ledger with audit trail; six admin sub-domains for operations
Delivery
Incremental replacement of the manual process; each email type migrated with a rollback path.
Results
- Incentive operations run by ops staff, not engineers
- Deliverability issues dropped to per-recipient exceptions
- Every reward and email auditable end-to-end
Client anonymized by industry. Detailed numbers and references available on a call.