# Built company ownership claims end to end — a user claims a company, an administrator adjudicates, and an approval rewrites the authorization graph that decides who is allowed to edit what. 2025 **Situation.** A directory seeded from public sources has a structural problem: the companies in it did not put themselves there. Sooner or later somebody from one of them turns up wanting to correct their own entry — and there is no relationship between that person and that record, only an assertion that one exists. Grant it too readily and a competitor edits your page. Grant it too slowly and the directory stays wrong. **Task.** There had to be a route from "this is my company" to genuine authority over the record, with a human decision in the middle and a trail behind it. **Action.** Claims were built end to end, across 108 commits and both applications. A user submits a claim with evidence; it enters a queue in the back‑office; an administrator reviews it and approves or rejects it with a reason that goes back to the claimant. The interesting part is what approval does — it is not a flag on a row. Approval rewrites the authorization graph, so the account gains a real relationship to the organization, which is the same relationship every permission check in the platform already consults. The gate is the adjudication, not the code path, and no feature had to learn about claiming in order to respect it. **Result.** Companies can take over and correct their own entries without anyone editing the database by hand, and every grant of authority has a named approver and a reason attached. Human review is the bottleneck by design; an automated check on a domain name would be faster and would be wrong in exactly the cases that matter most. --- - Role: Full Stack Engineer - Categories: [Backend Engineering](https://engineer.company/categories/backend/), [Frontend Engineering](https://engineer.company/categories/frontend/), [Full‑Stack Development](https://engineer.company/categories/full-stack/), [Security](https://engineer.company/categories/security/), [Product & Requirements](https://engineer.company/categories/product/) - Services: [Full‑Stack Product Development](https://engineer.company/services/full-stack-development/), [Security & Access Management](https://engineer.company/services/security-access/), [Product Strategy & Requirements](https://engineer.company/services/product-strategy/)