Anyone can write an
Express route.
Hire someone who has kept one alive.
Our Node engineers work full-time inside your sprints and stay on our payroll. You get the person; we keep the contract, the benefits, the laptop and the cover when they take leave.
- Rate band
- $28–48 / hour
- Typical lead time
- 5–8 days to first standup
- Commitment
- Full-time, one client at a time
- Minimum term
- 1 month
- Overlap
- 4+ hours with your working day
- Employed by
- Virtus Infotech
Six ways a Node service dies at 3 a.m.
This is the list we interview against, and it is the list you should interview against too. A developer who has met four of these has production scars. One who has met none has written tutorials.
p99 latency climbs, CPU is flat
Something synchronous is parked on the event loop — a big JSON.parse, a sync crypto call, a regex that backtracks.
Loop-lag metric on the dashboard, heavy work moved to worker threads or a queue, and the offending regex bounded.
Memory climbs until the pod is OOM-killed
A closure holding request scope, an unbounded cache, or listeners added per request and never removed.
Heap snapshots compared across two hours, the retainer named, and a max size put on every cache that did not have one.
Requests hang, then everything hangs
Connection pool exhausted. One slow query holds a client; the next fifty queue behind it.
Pool size tuned against database max_connections, statement timeouts set, and a circuit breaker on the slow dependency.
Process exits with no stack trace
An unhandled promise rejection, or an error thrown inside a callback nobody wrapped.
Global handlers that log and exit cleanly, async errors surfaced through the framework, and structured logs with a request id.
It works on one instance and breaks on four
State kept in module scope — an in-memory session, a rate-limit counter, a scheduled job running on every replica.
State pushed to Redis or the database, and schedulers given a distributed lock.
The deploy is fine, the traffic spike is not
No back-pressure. Node happily accepts more work than it can finish and dies politely.
A queue with a bounded depth, load-shedding above a threshold, and a load test that proves the number.
Six things they pick up in the first sprint
They join your standup, your repo and your review rotation. There is no parallel Virtus process running alongside yours — that is the point of the model.
API and service work
REST and GraphQL services in TypeScript, with request validation at the boundary and typed responses out of it.
Event-driven plumbing
Queues and streams — BullMQ, SQS, Kafka — with retries, dead-letter handling and idempotent consumers.
Database work that matters
Schema design, migrations, indexes, and the query plan review that stops a table scan reaching production.
Integrations
Payment providers, ERPs, third-party APIs — including the rate limits, webhooks and replay logic nobody scopes.
Performance
Profiling, caching strategy, connection pooling, and the load test that turns an opinion into a number.
The boring rigour
Tests that run in CI, structured logging, health checks, graceful shutdown, and a runbook for the on-call rotation.
What they already know
Pick the level, not just the language
Mid-level
3–5 yrs$28–34/hrShips features in an existing codebase with review. Comfortable with the framework, still learning the failure modes.
Senior
5–8 yrs$34–42/hrOwns a service end to end. Designs the schema, sets the SLOs, and is the one who reads the heap snapshot.
Lead / Architect
8+ yrs$42–58/hrSets service boundaries, reviews across teams, and makes the calls you will still be living with in three years.
Bands are indicative and depend on time-zone overlap and engagement length. The quote we send you is fixed for the term.
Tell us what the service has to do
Throughput, dependencies, deadline. We will send two or three Node engineers who have shipped that shape of system before — with an honest note on where each is weaker.