Work · Integrations · 2023
Bidirectional WhatsApp messaging at ecosystem scale
An event-driven Laravel integration with WhatsApp Cloud API supporting 12+ media types, message templates, queue-based processing, and a Strategy Pattern for handling varied message shapes.
The job
2 on the team,
8 weeks.
- Client
- Direct
- Sector
- Integrations
- Year
- 2023
- Role
- Tech Lead
Brief and outcome
What was needed.
The Direct ecosystem needed a single WhatsApp pipeline that all of its products could plug into — outbound transactional messages, inbound customer replies, media handling, template approvals, the works. Building it once, well, beat reinventing it per product.
What came of it.
Every product in the Direct ecosystem now talks to customers over WhatsApp through one pipeline. Throughput, observability, and template governance all live in one place; product teams ship features without re-learning the API.
What was built
5 parts,
shipped.
A selection of projects shipped through Syntorium and our CTO's prior engagements.
Event-driven architecture
Every product publishes domain events, the WhatsApp module subscribes and dispatches, and inbound replies become events the products can consume.
Strategy Pattern for media types
Text, audio, video, images, documents, contacts, locations, interactive buttons, list messages, reactions, stickers, voice notes — each with a typed handler.
Repository pattern
Wrapping the Cloud API so business code never imports the SDK directly. Swapping providers (BSP migrations, Twilio fallback) becomes a one-config change.
Queue-based processing
Retry budgets, dead-letter queues, and a manual replay tool. Inbound webhooks are processed asynchronously so the WhatsApp ack-window is never a bottleneck.
Template management
Submission, approval status sync, locale-aware variant selection.
More work
Start
Send a brief.
We reply within one working day with a written estimate or a call.
No newsletters. Your details aren't shared.
Or say hello.
Sunday to Thursday, 09:00–18:00, GMT+4. Remote engineers cover the EU and the US asynchronously. We work in English, Arabic and Urdu.