Nick Hess

Staff Engineering Leader with 11 years of experience architecting and delivering large-scale web platforms. Lead an 8-person engineering team owning Peloton’s consumer-facing e-commerce experience at onepeloton.com and the web platform infrastructure serving 70+ engineers. Track record of expanding scope from internal platform engineering into public-facing product systems, defining technical direction across organizational boundaries, personally executing the highest-complexity initiatives, and measurably improving developer velocity and system reliability. Speaker at Next.js Conf 2024.

Next.js Conf 2024

Presented "Incrementally Migrating to Next.js from a Client-Side-Only App" to a global audience, detailing Peloton’s multi-year migration strategy, performance gains, and architectural decisions.

Watch the talk

Experience

Peloton Interactive

Staff Tech Lead Manager, Discovery

Jul 2024 Present
  • Expanded team from 4 to 8 engineers, taking dual ownership of Peloton’s consumer e-commerce experience (millions of monthly users) and the web platform infrastructure serving 70+ engineers across the organization.
  • Cut deployment lead time by 50% by migrating 8 Next.js applications from Netlify to Vercel with custom orchestration, then building a full CI/CD pipeline (GitHub Actions, Vercel SDK, NX) used across ~55,000+ PRs in the monorepo.
  • Decomposed a monolithic React application into independently deployable Next.js microfrontends using Vercel’s split architecture, unlocking autonomous team releases and faster build times.
  • Co-led migration from a GraphQL monolith to a federated architecture, eliminating schema-related production incidents and enabling safe, independent schema evolution across teams.
  • Drove monorepo health initiatives — circular dependency guardrails, barrel import rewriting, React 18.3 upgrade — reducing build coupling and unblocking the org-wide pnpm migration.

Senior Software Engineer

Sep 2023 Jul 2024
  • Reduced customer support ticket volume by 40% during peak seasons by building Self Service features for direct member order modifications.
  • Led incremental migration from a client-side-only React app to Next.js with SSR, improving Core Web Vitals and SEO — presented this work at Next.js Conf 2024.
  • Modernized the release process to align with DORA metrics, achieving 50%+ faster deployment lead time and 10% improvement in pipeline reliability.

Software Engineer

May 2020 Sep 2023
  • Shipped core e-commerce features across Peloton’s consumer web platform (React, TypeScript, GraphQL), contributing to the shared design system and component library used by all e-commerce teams.
  • Introduced ESLint configurations, automated testing patterns, and PR review workflows that became the org-wide standard for frontend code quality.

LoftSmart

Full Stack Engineer

Apr 2019 Mar 2020
  • Refactored a legacy multi-page application to a React SPA, improving time-to-interactive by 30%.
  • Led TypeScript migration for the React frontend, reducing production bug rate by 80%.
  • Developed an interactive rental preference quiz driving 10% conversion rate improvement across 5 university campuses.

Big Spaceship

Senior Technologist

Feb 2019 Apr 2019

Technologist

Jan 2017 Feb 2019

Junior Technologist

Jul 2015 Jan 2017
  • Delivered bespoke web experiences for Starbucks, Compass, and other premium clients, handling high-traffic launches and complex interactive requirements.
  • Established engineering standards including automated testing, CI pipelines, and code quality tooling, improving project delivery efficiency by 10%.

Technical Skills

Languages

TypeScriptJavaScriptPythonKotlin

Frameworks

ReactNext.jsGraphQL (Apollo, Federation)Node.js

Infrastructure

VercelAWSGoogle CloudCloudflareDockerKubernetes

CI/CD & Tooling

GitHub ActionsNXTurborepoDatadogVercel SDK

Databases

PostgreSQLMySQLNoSQL (DynamoDB, Firestore)

Architecture

MicrofrontendsMonorepo managementEdge computingFederated GraphQLREST APIs

Education

Michigan State University

B.S. Media & Information, Interactive Media Design