Freelance Software Architect Portfolio: Scalable and High-Performance Projects
These are case studies from my work as a freelance software architect. Projects where the hard part wasn’t writing code, but making the right structural decisions under real constraints: scale, performance, and long-term maintainability. For each one below you’ll see the problem I was brought in to solve, the architectural approach I took, and the result from stabilizing a SaaS platform as it grew from 50,000 to over a million users, to designing back-end systems that hold up in production. If you’re evaluating someone for your own project, you can also hire me as a software architect.
GoSchoolBox – Scaling a SaaS Platform from 50K to 1M+ Users
The challenge: GoSchoolBox is the technical infrastructure layer connecting school districts with tutoring companies. As it grew from 50,000 to over a million users, the platform began buckling under load, gateway timeouts, spontaneous errors, slow page loads, and user flows that degraded as traffic climbed.
The architecture work: Brought in as software architect to make it stable and scalable, I set up Application Performance Monitoring with metrics and dashboards to pinpoint where the system was actually failing under real traffic. I refactored the critical user flows and server-side logic behind the bottlenecks to raise throughput, and re-architected the MongoDB query and indexing strategy so searches across millions of records returned in seconds instead of timing out.
The outcome: A stable, resilient platform that scaled cleanly past a million users with fast, consistent performance.
- AWS
- Datadog
- MongoDB
Burro – Route Management System for Autonomous Robots
The challenge: Burro’s customers needed to create, edit, and manage navigation routes for fleets of autonomous farming robots — and manage that route data in a way that stayed organized as it grew.
The architecture work: I built an interactive web application with a Leaflet.js map interface for drawing, editing, and visualizing custom routes, backed by a dynamic tree-view structure for organizing route data. The key was integrating cleanly with Burro’s existing backend systems so route changes flowed reliably to the robots in the field.
The outcome: A streamlined route-management tool that made a complex robotics workflow intuitive for non-technical customers.
- React
- Leaflet.js
- Node.js
Provenance — Technical Foundation & Fractional CTO Leadership
The challenge: Provenance needed both hands-on architecture and senior technical direction, a product roadmap, a codebase that wouldn’t rot into technical debt, and infrastructure built to last.
The architecture work: Acting as fractional CTO, I architected and built the project’s infrastructure, CI pipeline, and third-party integrations from the ground up. Alongside the build, I led the development team, ran code reviews to catch issues before they became debt, and established the best practices and tooling that kept delivery fast and code quality high.
The outcome: A well-structured technical foundation and a development process built to scale with the team.
- AWS
- Node.js
- React.js
Saycaster — Building an Interactive Podcast Platform End to End
The challenge: Saycaster needed a platform where podcasters could enrich audio with interactive “spots” such as links, social embeds, images, and video previews tied to specific moments and keep listeners engaged with that content in real time.
The architecture work: I designed and built the platform from scratch, choosing a stack (Node.js, PostgreSQL, React, D3.js) suited to structured, time-anchored audio data and interactive rendering. That meant modeling how spots attach to moments in a recording and serving them to listeners as engaging, in-context content.
The outcome: A dynamic podcast platform that turns passive audio into an interactive listening experience.
- Node.js
- PostgreSQL
- React
- D3.js
Note API Connector — Designing an Integration Platform from Scratch
The challenge: Notion users needed a no-code way to connect external APIs, automate workflows, and sync data into their workspaces — which meant building a reliable multi-tenant platform, not a one-off script.
The architecture work: I designed and built the entire platform end to end: the backend infrastructure, authentication, a scheduling system, and the integration engine that powers the connections. The hard part was making it dependable and repeatable at scale, so thousands of users’ automations run reliably in the background.
The outcome: A production integration platform used by thousands of Notion users to connect APIs and sync external data automatically.
- AWS
- React
- Node.js
Tau — A Back-End Service Aggregating Multiple Third-Party APIs
The challenge: A Gatsby-based site needed continuously fresh, reliable content pulled together from several unrelated external sources such as crypto exchanges, GitHub, Twitter, and Telegram, each with its own API quirks.
The architecture work: I built a Node.js back-end service to aggregate and process data from all of these third-party APIs into a single, consistent feed for the front end, and deployed it on AWS for reliable, hands-off operation.
The outcome: A dependable data layer that keeps the site up to date automatically, insulating the front end from the messiness of the underlying sources.
- Node.js
- AWS
Ship***
I designed and developed a corporate marketing website using Next.js, ensuring all pages are fully responsive and optimized for SEO. As part of my role as a software architect, I implemented a solution to integrate Contentful as a headless CMS, mapping content to website design elements in a way that allows content creators to dynamically control and update UI components without developer intervention. This approach combined GraphQL for efficient data fetching and transformation, resulting in a highly flexible, scalable, and maintainable content management system tailored to business needs.
DEVELOPMENT TOOLS- Next.js
- Contentful
- GraphQL
- Mapbox