Node Architect - Freelance

Netguru is a trusted partner in digital commerce. The company helps 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. A certified B Corporation®, Netguru is trusted by major brands including IKEA, VW, OLX, Delivery Hero, Żabka, Wolt, Careem, and Vinted.

How freelancing works at Netguru?

As a , you can choose what works well for you. You decide when, where, and how you work on projects and tasks. 

We match you with work that fits your skills. Plus, you have access to various opportunities across different industries and companies. That means you will not only gain more experience, but also develop various skills.

But there's more. Netguru freelancers can benefit from full-time collaboration and really be a part of the team.

So, are you ready to make an impact? Join Netguru, and let's build beautiful software together.

We are looking for a Staff Node.js Developer - Architecture

This role is fully remote, we accept candidates from anywhere around the globe, given that candidates are within an acceptable time-zone difference to UTC+4 (at least 5 hours of overlap)

Salary: up to 42 EUR/h (on a B2B)

Start date: September 2026

Duration: till 31.12.2026

Engagement: Full-time

Requirements

We are looking for Software Engineers with:

(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.

Also required:

• 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:

This isn't a "managed team" gig and it isn't ticket-closing work. The client has strong internal engineers already — what they're bringing in is deep system design and architecture judgement: help deciding what to build, where the boundaries sit, what breaks first under load, and what's expensive to change a year from now. You'll work as a technical peer to the client's Staff engineers and engineering managers, inside their existing rituals (planning, standups, design review), and your designs go into production — not into a slide deck.

What you'd actually be doing:

• Digging into an existing multi-product architecture to understand why it looks the way it does before proposing changes.
• Delivering 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.
• Writing and reviewing RFCs and ADRs for new and evolving systems: assumptions, failure modes, capacity, security made explicit.
• Designing extend-vs-rebuild decisions with the migration path built in from day one — incremental, reversible, with a rollback story.
• Working 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.

Benefits

• 100% remote work;

• work with an experienced team of developers and continuous development of your hard and soft skills;
• long-term collaboration on challenging products