Node Architect - Freelance

Netguru

5d•Remote

About The Position

Netguru is a trusted partner in digital commerce, helping leading brands modernize B2B solutions, marketplaces, and retail ecosystems. Since 2008, it has empowered businesses with cutting-edge technology, AI-powered personalization, and world-class engineering and design teams. Netguru is a certified B Corporation® and is trusted by major brands including IKEA, VW, OLX, Delivery Hero, Żabka, Wolt, Careem, and Vinted. This role is for a Staff Node.js Developer - Architecture, which is fully remote and accepts candidates globally, provided they have at least 5 hours of overlap with UTC+4. The role involves deep system design and architecture judgment, working as a technical peer to the client's Staff engineers and engineering managers within their existing rituals. Designs will go into production, not just slide decks. The work involves understanding existing architectures, assessing code and design quality, writing and reviewing RFCs and ADRs, and making extend-vs-rebuild decisions with migration paths built-in. The role will also deal with real constraints such as multi-currency payments, fraud and abuse exposure, PCI DSS scope, third-party supplier integrations, and significant traffic spikes.

Requirements

8+ years of experience
Comfortable designing across several teams' surfaces — everything a strong Senior does, plus:
Anticipate future use cases and design to minimize the cost of change, and express that trade-off in cost terms rather than aesthetic ones.
Anticipate scaling limits across a domain before they bind, including shared dependencies such as authentication and supplier integrations, and raise capacity implications during design review rather than after launch.
Review others' designs substantively — identify a design that will not scale or will be expensive to change, and say so early and constructively.
Work comfortably as a technical peer to Staff engineers and engineering managers, including disagreeing with them productively.
Design services using well-understood patterns for iterative, autonomous development and future scaling — bounded contexts, deliberately minimizing cross-service dependencies for resilience.
Design for expected peak load rather than average, know the limits of the services and third-party dependencies a feature relies on, and validate those limits by testing rather than by reasoning alone.
Build components other teams can adopt, with documentation and a migration path — treating other teams as consumers, not recipients.
Design with abuse in mind by default — rate limits, velocity checks, idempotency — and raise risk trade-offs during design and review rather than after launch.
Reading and being able to explain every line of AI-generated code you ship — no merging what you can't explain.
Testing that actually covers edge and failure cases, not just happy-path coverage.
Working command of OWASP Top 10 and secure-by-default habits (secrets management, input validation, data handling).
Strong written English — most collaboration happens asynchronously via RFCs and reviews.
A collaborative style: you bring options with trade-offs, argue with reasoning rather than seniority, and can lose a technical argument gracefully.

Responsibilities

Help deciding what to build, where the boundaries sit, what breaks first under load, and what's expensive to change a year from now.
Work as a technical peer to the client's Staff engineers and engineering managers, inside their existing rituals (planning, standups, design review).
Dig into an existing multi-product architecture to understand why it looks the way it does before proposing changes.
Deliver an honest, evidence-based assessment of code and design quality across product lines — correctness on money/stock paths, security posture, coupling between product lines, capacity risk.
Write and review RFCs and ADRs for new and evolving systems: assumptions, failure modes, capacity, security made explicit.
Design extend-vs-rebuild decisions with the migration path built in from day one — incremental, reversible, with a rollback story.
Work with real constraints: multi-currency payments (IQD/AED/SAR), fraud and abuse exposure, PCI DSS scope, third-party supplier integrations, and traffic spikes up to 65x baseline.