Full-Stack Engineer (Next.js)

This profile represents one of the most requested shapes in the turnkey.dev network: a generalist who can carry a SaaS product across the whole stack without waiting on anyone.

Background

Seven years building web products end to end, most of them subscription SaaS and e-commerce. Started on the front end with React, grew into Node.js APIs and PostgreSQL data modeling, and now works most naturally in Next.js where the two meet. Used to being the person a founder or product lead hands a problem to, not a ticket queue.

What the work actually looks like

SaaS products are mostly made of the same hard parts, and this archetype has built them repeatedly. Authentication with sessions, OAuth providers, and the password reset and email verification flows nobody enjoys writing. Billing against Stripe or a similar provider, which sounds like an afternoon and is actually webhooks, proration, dunning, plan changes mid-cycle, and keeping the app’s idea of a subscription honest when the payment provider disagrees. Multi-tenant data modeling, where the early decision about how tenants are isolated in PostgreSQL follows the product for years.

On top of that sits the product work itself: dashboards, onboarding flows, admin panels, background jobs for emails and exports, and the feature flags that let a small team ship weekly without breaking paying customers. A developer like this has also done the unglamorous operational half, setting up preview deployments, error tracking, and enough monitoring to hear about problems before customers do.

Strengths

• End-to-end delivery. Can go from a rough spec to a deployed feature: database migration, API route, UI, and tests, on the same day when the feature is small enough to deserve it.
• Next.js in production. Knows the framework’s rendering and caching tradeoffs from real projects, not tutorials. Understands when server components earn their complexity, what belongs in middleware, and why an aggressive cache in front of personalized pages is a support ticket generator.
• Auth and billing scar tissue. Has implemented subscription billing more than once and treats webhook handling, idempotency, and reconciliation as core product code rather than plumbing.
• Pragmatic data modeling. Designs PostgreSQL schemas that survive the first three pivots: sensible constraints, indexes added from query plans rather than superstition, and migrations that run safely against live data.
• Product sense. Asks why before building, which saves teams from shipping the wrong thing quickly.

Seniority signals

The difference between this profile and a mid-level generalist shows up in what they refuse to do. They will not scatter business logic between client components, API routes, and database triggers until nobody knows where the truth lives. They will not model billing state by trusting their own database over the payment provider’s webhooks. They reach for boring tools by default, and can tell you exactly which past decision taught them each of those habits.

What to probe in the interview

Ask how they would model tenants in PostgreSQL and what they would give up with each option. Ask what has gone wrong with a billing integration they built, since anyone who has done the work has a story, and the story is where the judgment shows. Ask which parts of Next.js they choose not to use and why. Vague enthusiasm about the framework is a worse sign than specific complaints.

Typical engagement

Full time on a single product, ideally embedded with a small team, and strongest where one person owning the whole slice removes coordination overhead: an early product finding its shape, or an established one that needs features shipped without a committee. European hours with comfortable overlap into the North American morning. Available now.

This is a representative sample of the vetted pool. Request it and we confirm real, current availability for a developer with this background.