Building real-time core backend infrastructure for Pan-European delivery logistics.

Steven helped build and launch Stuart’s mobile backend streaming functionality providing realtime platform updates, routing millions of delivery requests every week across 100s of European cities. Helping Stuart maintain its reputation for hyper-reliability as well as introducing improvements to company-wide engineering, QA and security practice.

Tech Stack

Redis PubSub, Event-based architecture, WebSocket protocol, Node.js, Express, TypeScript, OpenAPI, Kubernetes, AWS, DevOps, Prometheus, Thanos, Grafana. Kafka. Auto scaling. Graceful shutdown. Test automation. K6. SonarCloud. ZAP Scan. Authentication. JWT. ECDSA Web crypto API, Observability dashboards. Mentoring.

Key Deliverables

The mobile app team was looking to scale its functionality but was being held back by slow progress. The key deliverable to unblock them was to extract the core message streaming functionality so that it could be iterated and built upon, by putting it into a separate Kubernetes hosted service, built using Node.js and TypeScript and WebSockets, with Redis as the pub/sub fanout mechanism.

The project was a success. Delivered on time and within budget while leading a small team of engineers. In addition to the project goals Steven also worked on creating several other APIs (feature flags, device log streaming) and made company-wide improvements to DevEx, QA and Security practice.

Feedback

Here is feedback on Linkedin. From Pau Picas and Sergi

Steven is an outstanding engineer. In the short time he was at Stuart, Steven was able to ‘hit the ground running’ and made a significant contribution by implementing a notification system to allow the real-time processing of delivery requests in the mobile app. This ensured that critical data was reliably processed, and performance-tested at scale, paving the path for us to reliably scale our platform.

Steven’s technical proficiency in Node.js and backend APIs, coupled with his ability to collaborate across teams, made him an invaluable asset. I highly recommend him for any role that values innovation, problem-solving, and teamwork.

It was a great pleasure having you onboard. Thank you for all your great contributions and leadership Esteban!

Get in touch

If you wish to hear more about this project, please feel free to reach out on the links below.