Nick Hess

nick@nickhess.devGitHubLinkedInXResume(.md/.txt)

Staff Engineering Leader with 11 years of experience architecting and delivering large-scale web platforms. Lead two teams at Peloton — eComm Discovery, driving every top-of-funnel surface across the e-commerce org, and Web Platform, the foundation powering Peloton’s web experiences end-to-end — alongside investments in AI dev tooling, including contributions to Peloton’s internal MCP server fleet. Track record of expanding scope across organizational boundaries, setting technical direction, 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 "The long and winding road: CSR to static export to SSG" 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
  • Lead two teams at Peloton — eComm Discovery, driving every top-of-funnel e-commerce surface, and Web Platform, the foundation powering Peloton’s web experiences — alongside investments in AI dev tooling, including contributions to Peloton’s internal MCP server fleet.
  • Cut deployment lead time by 50% by migrating 8 Next.js apps from Netlify to Vercel and building a custom CI/CD pipeline on GitHub Actions, the Vercel SDK, and Nx — now running across 55,000+ PRs in the monorepo.
  • Broke up a monolithic React app into independently deployable Next.js microfrontends on Vercel’s split architecture, giving product teams autonomous release trains and cutting average build time by 40%.
  • Co-led the migration from a GraphQL monolith to a federated graph, letting teams evolve their schemas independently and driving schema-related production incidents to near zero.
  • Unblocked the org-wide pnpm migration by leading monorepo health work — circular-dependency guardrails, automated barrel-import rewrites, and the React 18.3 upgrade — cutting cross-package build coupling across the codebase.

Senior Software Engineer

Sep 2023 — Jul 2024
  • Presented at Next.js Conf 2024 on incrementally migrating Peloton’s consumer web from a client-rendered React SPA to Next.js with SSR, improving Core Web Vitals across the funnel and measurably lifting organic search traffic.
  • Rebuilt the release pipeline around DORA metrics: 50%+ faster deployment lead time and a 10% lift in pipeline reliability.

Software Engineer

May 2020 — Sep 2023
  • Cut peak-season customer support ticket volume by 40% by shipping self-serve order-modification flows on the Order Experience team, including the Order Cancellation MVP and delivery scheduling/rescheduling experiences.
  • Shipped core storefront, PDP, and checkout features across Peloton’s consumer web (React, TypeScript, GraphQL).
  • Contributed to the shared design system and component library adopted by every e-commerce team at Peloton.
  • Authored the ESLint configs, 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

ReactReact Server ComponentsNext.jsGraphQL (Apollo, Federation)Node.js

Infrastructure

VercelVercel EdgeAWSGoogle CloudCloudflareDockerKubernetes

CI/CD & Observability

GitHub ActionsNxTurborepoVercel SDKDatadogOpenTelemetryDORA metrics

Databases

PostgreSQLMySQLNoSQL (DynamoDB, Firestore)

Architecture

MicrofrontendsMonorepo managementEdge computingFederated GraphQLREST APIs

AI / LLM

MCP serversLLM integrationsRAGAgentic workflowsPrompt engineering

Education

Michigan State University

B.S. Media & Information, Interactive Media Design