TypeScript strict mode. NestJS, Express, Fastify. 17 years. Built at $1B+ unicorn scale. Fixed $4,999/mo.
- Scope
- Ship
- Iterate
monthly subscription
Who this is for
You are running a Node.js and TypeScript backend — funded, growing, and past CRUD — and you need a senior hire who can take end-to-end ownership without someone writing the architecture in a ticket first.
The pain today
- Event-loop blockers that cause latency spikes you cannot reproduce locally.
- Jobs running synchronously inside the request because there is no queue strategy.
- Structured logging, metrics, and tracing all absent — blind on production issues.
- Deploys are SSH-and-hope with no pipeline, no rollback, and no zero-downtime path.
- TypeScript in name only — any cast everywhere, no strict mode, no shared types.
The outcome you get
- A senior Node.js engineer with 17 years of production experience across fintech and SaaS.
- TypeScript strict mode applied consistently — no any, shared types between frontend and backend.
- A queue strategy (BullMQ, SQS, or Kafka) designed and deployed for your specific load.
- Observability baseline shipped: structured logs, Sentry, and Prometheus metrics from day one.
- CI/CD pipeline with Docker, GitHub Actions, and zero-downtime deploys on AWS or Fly.io.
Node.js across fintech and SaaS production systems
Node.js is in my core stack. At bolttech, a $1B+ unicorn, I led backend payment orchestration on NestJS and Node.js, integrating 40+ payment providers across Asia and Europe at 99.9% uptime. At Cuez, a Belgian broadcast SaaS, Node workers handled auxiliary processing alongside the Laravel core. More recently, the Norte Web Digital CRM runs on Node.js and TypeScript, processing 250 new leads per day through a WhatsApp integration stack that has stayed at 0 bans since launch.
Typescript strict mode is the baseline on every engagement. Fastify, NestJS, or Express gets chosen based on what the domain structure actually needs — not what appeared in a trending article this week. Every service I ship includes structured logging, Sentry error capture, and a basic Prometheus metrics endpoint so you can see what is happening the moment traffic changes.
A senior Node.js engineer with 17 years of production experience across fintech and SaaS.
Where Node.js teams break at scale
Three categories cover the bulk of the production issues I find. Event-loop blockers: synchronous JSON.parse on large payloads, synchronous file I/O inside request handlers, crypto operations on the main thread. All of these should move to worker_threads or async equivalents. The fix is usually one afternoon, but the hunt takes days without the right profiler setup.
Memory leaks follow a short list: closures that hold request references longer than needed, EventEmitter listeners attached without a matching removeListener, in-process caches with no eviction policy. A heap snapshot diff across three traffic periods finds the offender in most cases.
Queue problems are the third category. Retries that explode without a dead-letter queue, jobs that fail silently because errors are caught and swallowed, Redis memory growing unbounded because completed jobs are never removed. Configuring BullMQ correctly — stalled job detection, job TTL, graceful shutdown, worker crash recovery — is a full design task, not a copy-paste job.
Fixing these three categories is the difference between a Node.js API that handles growth and one that keeps the on-call rotation awake every weekend.
40+: Payment providers integrated.
TypeScript, monorepos, and the microservices question
TypeScript strict mode is non-negotiable on greenfield work. I set up shared types between frontend and backend via a @repo/shared package inside a Turborepo or Nx monorepo. That single change eliminates a category of runtime errors where the API shape diverged from what the frontend expected, and nobody caught it until a production request failed.
On architecture: most startups that ask me about microservices are solving an organizational problem, not a technical one. A well-structured NestJS monolith with domain modules scales further than most funded startups will ever need to go. I have that opinion and I will tell you directly. If there is a genuine scaling or team independence reason to split a service, I will say that too — but I will not recommend microservices to justify a larger engagement.
For authentication I default to Clerk or Auth0 for new projects (lower maintenance surface), with custom JWT only when compliance requirements or infrastructure constraints make third-party auth a blocker.
What the engagement covers
The Applications subscription at $4,999 per month flat covers: API design across REST, GraphQL, and tRPC; framework work in NestJS, Express, or Fastify; queue architecture with BullMQ, SQS, or Kafka; database layer via Prisma, Drizzle, or Mongoose; authentication with Clerk, Auth0, Passport, or custom JWT; testing with Vitest or Jest plus Supertest plus Playwright; observability with structured logs, Sentry, and Prometheus metrics; CI/CD with GitHub Actions, Docker, and Pulumi for AWS; and deploy targets including AWS ECS, Vercel, and Fly.io.
I work inside an existing team or solo on a greenfield service. 2 to 4 day delivery cycles, daily async updates, weekly 30-minute call. I keep one customer at a time, which means your backlog is actually on my calendar rather than sitting in a queue behind ten other accounts.
Pricing and guarantees
$4,999 per month, flat. No hourly rate, no overage, no surprise invoices at the end of the month.
14-day money-back guarantee inside the first two weeks — full refund, no questions asked. Cancel anytime after that, month to month. Work Made for Hire from day one: every commit, every schema migration, every config file belongs to you the moment it ships. NDA is standard.
Senior Node.js engineers in the US bill $130 to $180 per hour, which puts a 40-hour week at $22,000 to $29,000 per month before benefits and payroll tax. This engagement covers the same caliber of work at a fraction of that cost with no hiring timeline, no recruiter fees, and no 45-day search before a single line of code ships.
Recent proof
A comparable engagement, delivered and documented.
Unified payment orchestration across Asia and Europe
Delivered the payment orchestration platform at bolttech, a $1B+ unicorn, with 40+ integrations across multiple regions.
Read the case studyFrequently asked questions
The questions prospects ask before they book.
A senior Node.js engineer in the US runs $130 to $180 per hour — roughly $22,000 to $29,000 per month at full-time hours, before benefits or payroll overhead. My Applications subscription is $4,999 per month flat. It covers the same caliber of backend work with no hiring timeline and no recruiter fee, and cancels month to month if the fit isn't right.
NestJS when the domain is complex enough to justify the module and dependency-injection structure. Fastify for lean, high-throughput services where framework overhead matters. Express only when maintaining an existing Express codebase. I don't introduce Express on new work in 2026 — the developer experience has fallen too far behind. The decision is always based on the domain, not preference.
Node 20 LTS by default. Node 22 on greenfield projects where the host supports it. I upgrade legacy apps from Node 16 or 18 as part of the monthly scope — version parity with supported LTS is table stakes on any backend I own.
BullMQ on Redis for most projects, SQS when the infrastructure is already AWS-native, Kafka when the volume or fan-out pattern justifies the operational cost. Every queue setup includes stalled job detection, a dead-letter queue, job TTL to prevent Redis memory growth, graceful shutdown, and worker crash recovery. These aren't optional — omitting them is how queues turn into incidents.
Prisma for most Postgres and MySQL projects. Drizzle when the team wants SQL-closer control or the schema is large enough that Prisma's query plan overhead shows up in benchmarks. Mongoose on MongoDB. Raw SQL inside Prisma's $queryRaw for the specific queries where the generated SQL is the bottleneck. The choice follows the data, not a default.
Yes. At bolttech I joined a team that already had its own conventions, PR process, and deployment pipeline, and I shipped within that structure from week one. I follow existing patterns rather than rewriting everything to match my preferences. If I think a convention is causing production problems, I raise it as a proposal, not a unilateral refactor.
Yes. Turborepo or Nx for Node plus Next.js monorepos. Shared types between frontend and backend go in a @repo/shared package, keeping both sides in sync without runtime surprises. CI caching keeps build times reasonable even as the repo grows. This setup prevents an entire class of API contract bugs that only surface in production.