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Backend Engineer — Node.js / NestJS

Ushahemba Shir

Senior Backend Engineer — Node.js / NestJS

Lagos, Nigeria+234 816 559 3275ushahembashir@gmail.comushahembashir.vercel.app

Professional Summary

Senior Backend Engineer with 5+ years of experience specialising in Node.js and NestJS microservice architectures. Proven track record delivering scalable RESTful APIs, event-driven services, and automated CI/CD pipelines across fintech and healthcare domains. Deep expertise in TypeScript, PostgreSQL, Redis, Docker, and AWS. Passionate about clean architecture, SOLID principles, Swagger-documented APIs, and high-performance payment system design. Experienced in leading teams, mentoring engineers, and shipping production-grade distributed systems.

Professional Experience

Backend Engineer

Soft Alliance · Lagos, Nigeria

Mar 2025 – Present
Contract
  • Architected and integrated Interswitch and Remita payment processors using NestJS, building end-to-end flows for payment link generation, HMAC-based authentication, and webhook-driven payment confirmation.
  • Integrated secure REST APIs from the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), enabling real-time disbursements and government collections across multiple agency channels.
  • Boosted government payment platform throughput by 3× through strategic PostgreSQL indexing, query plan analysis, and Redis caching of hot-path lookups.
  • Designed and implemented a PSSP admin microservice handling merchant onboarding, RSA key-pair provisioning, IP whitelisting policies, and TOTP-based 2FA authentication.
  • Containerised all NestJS services with Docker and deployed to AWS ECS, reducing environment drift and cutting deployment time by 40%.
  • Documented all APIs with Swagger/OpenAPI, reducing integration support queries by over 60%.

Senior Backend Developer

Octosoft Technologies Ltd · Hybrid

Jul 2023 – Jul 2025
Full-time
  • Designed and shipped a RESTful laboratory module and dynamic form-builder API (NestJS + PostgreSQL) adopted by 200+ hospitals, handling concurrent record creation with optimistic locking.
  • Led full CI/CD automation strategy using GitHub Actions, cutting release cycle time by 50%.
  • Developed a secure, modular payment service integrating Paystack and Flutterwave, supporting refunds, reconciliation webhooks, and idempotent transactions.
  • Introduced TypeORM migrations and a repository pattern, enabling zero-downtime schema changes across 15+ database tables.
  • Mentored two junior backend developers through code reviews, pair programming, and architecture walkthroughs, accelerating their onboarding by 3 weeks.
  • Authored Swagger documentation and integration test suites (Jest + Supertest), raising API test coverage from 30% to 75%.

Full Stack Developer

Nawill Technology Ltd · Remote

Mar 2020 – Jun 2023
Full-time
  • Built and maintained full-stack web applications using Node.js/Express and NestJS backends with React frontends on two-week sprint cycles for a fintech SaaS platform.
  • Implemented a real-time bidirectional chat system using Socket.io and Redis Pub/Sub, supporting 500+ concurrent users with message persistence in MongoDB.
  • Integrated Paydunya and Fedapay payment gateways for West African markets, implementing currency conversion logic and transaction state machines.
  • Enforced clean architecture patterns (modules, services, repositories), reducing inter-team merge conflicts and improving code review throughput.
  • Set up ESLint, Prettier, Husky pre-commit hooks, and Jest unit tests, establishing a consistent code quality baseline.

Technical Skills

Languages

TypeScript
JavaScript
Node.js
SQL

Frameworks

NestJS
Express.js
Fastify

Databases & ORMs

PostgreSQL
MongoDB
Redis
MySQL
TypeORM
Prisma
Mongoose
Sequelize

Architecture

Microservices
REST APIs
Event-Driven (RabbitMQ, Kafka)
CQRS
Modular Design

Cloud & DevOps

AWS (ECS, Lambda, S3, Amplify)
Docker
GitHub Actions
Jenkins

Testing & Quality

Jest
Supertest
ESLint
Prettier
Husky

API & Tooling

Swagger/OpenAPI
Postman
Git
Linux
pnpm/npm workspaces

Education

MEST Africa

Business, Technology & Communication

2023 – 2024

Decagon Institute

Software Engineering & Leadership

2022

University of Nigeria

B.LIS / Economics

2016

Chat on WhatsAppResume | Ushahemba Shir