Welcome Pickups — Travel Marketplace Apps by Antzelo BalliuWelcome Pickups — Travel Marketplace Apps by Antzelo Balliu

Welcome Pickups — Travel Marketplace Apps

Antzelo Balliu

Antzelo Balliu

Welcome Pickups is a B2B/B2C travel marketplace connecting travelers with local drivers for airport transfers and experiences. I joined as a senior frontend engineer, working in a mixed team of 3 backend engineers, 2 frontend engineers (including me), and a designer.
On the frontend side, I led the technical direction for both legacy projects and new greenfield work, owning architecture decisions, code quality standards, and release strategy.

Tips Subplatform (Greenfield)

The flagship greenfield project during my time: a standalone tipping platform built from scratch in Next.js + TypeScript. Took it from empty repo to production in 5 weeks, including architecture, UI implementation, API integration, and deployment.
Tips platform
Tips platform
Tips platform detail
Tips platform detail
The platform shipped with a 95+ Web Vitals score across all Core Web Vitals metrics, built performance-first from the start rather than optimized after the fact.

Driver Mobile App

Technical owner of the driver-facing hybrid mobile application (Ionic + Angular) used daily by the active driver network. This was a mature codebase that needed careful modernization without breaking the production experience drivers depended on.
Designed and led major version upgrades across the mobile stack: Ionic, Angular, and Node environment upgrades. These weren't minor bumps; they involved breaking changes, dependency rewiring, and regression testing across the full app surface.

Fleet Management Platform

Maintained and extended an internal CSR React application used for driver onboarding and fleet management. Built new features for the onboarding flow and day-to-day driver management workflows. This was internal tooling, so no public screenshots, but it was a core operational surface for the business.

E2E Testing with Playwright

Started the team's end-to-end testing practice from zero using Playwright. Defined the test architecture, wrote the initial suite, and established patterns for the team to build on. Before this, there was no automated browser-level testing.

Sentry-Driven Optimization

Analyzed Sentry error reports systematically to identify high-impact bugs and performance bottlenecks. Used these reports to prioritize refactoring work, fix silent failures, and improve reliability across both the mobile app and web surfaces.

How I Worked

Led frontend technical direction for the team: stack decisions, refactoring priorities, upgrade planning, and code review standards. Collaborated directly with the designer on UI/UX and with backend engineers on API contracts. Balanced greenfield delivery (Tips platform) with ongoing maintenance and modernization of the legacy mobile stack and internal fleet management tools.
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Posted Jun 24, 2026

Senior frontend engineer and technical lead at Welcome Pickups. Led frontend direction across legacy mobile apps and greenfield web projects, shipped the Tips subplatform in 5 weeks with 95+ Web Vitals.

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Timeline

Mar 1, 2023 - May 31, 2024

Clients

Welcome Pickups