Senior engineer.
20+ years shipping.
AI-native.
I'm Nick Baker — Director of Engineering by day, consultant and builder the rest of the time. I help teams ship production-quality software using modern tooling and two decades of hard-won experience.
~ Tell me about your project
20+
Years shipping production code
14+
Years leading engineering teams
70+
Open-source projects
2005
WebTechNick LLC founded
Why Work With Me
What you get when you hire a senior engineer with startup-to-enterprise experience.
Production-grade from day one
You get code written by someone who's been deploying to production for two decades. No "learning on your dime."
AI-native workflow, senior oversight
I ship faster with Cursor and Claude, but every line gets the scrutiny of 20+ years of experience.
One senior engineer, not a team of juniors
No hand-offs, no communication overhead. You work directly with the person writing the code.
Proven at scale
I lead an engineering org by day. I understand deadlines, trade-offs, and what "done" actually means for a business.
Career Timeline
2005 – Present
WebTechNick LLC — Founder & Principal Engineer
Full-stack consulting practice building production applications, AI-powered products, and high-availability systems for clients across industries.
- Architected and deployed 5+ production SaaS applications with real-time features (WebSockets, broadcasting, live updates)
- Built AI-integrated products with OpenAI, queue-driven pipelines (Horizon), and event-driven architectures at scale
- Designed zero-downtime Docker deployments with automated TLS (Caddy, Certbot), healthchecks, and resource management
- Delivered trading-signal platforms with priority queues, CI/CD pipelines, and algorithmic scoring engines
- Engineered engineering-metrics dashboards with multi-provider ETL, job orchestration, and container-native delivery (GHCR)
2010 – Present
Continued — Director of Engineering
Grew from Senior Developer to Director of Engineering for a professional continuing-education platform serving millions of users across healthcare, education, and professional licensing.
- Architected a 10-service federated GraphQL platform (Apollo Router + Laravel microservices) handling millions of course enrollments
- Lead engineering team through live webinar spikes — real-time CE credit tracking with zero downtime during peak concurrent sessions
- Designed event-driven architecture (AWS SNS/SQS) decoupling domains for independent scaling under load
- Integrated Elasticsearch across 6+ indices (courses, users, articles, B2B catalogs) powering sub-second search at scale
- Established TDD culture with comprehensive test suites (PHPUnit + Pest) maintained across major framework upgrades
- Manage integrations with Auth0, Recurly (billing), Kaltura (video), and Snowflake (data lake/analytics)
2008 – 2014
CakePHP Ecosystem — Core Contributor
Authored popular open-source plugins and contributed to the framework ecosystem during its peak adoption years.
- SEO Plugin (70+ GitHub stars) — meta tags, sitemaps, canonical URLs
- Gigya Social Plugin (22+ stars) — multi-provider social auth integration
- Active community contributor and plugin maintainer
2004
University of New Mexico — B.S. Computer Science
Started career building web applications in PHP and Java. Full-stack from day one.
Tech I Ship With
What I Believe
Ship it right, not just fast
AI tooling makes us faster, but speed without quality is just technical debt at 10x.
Tests aren't optional
If it's not tested, it doesn't work. TDD is a practice, not a checkbox.
People over resources
Good engineering culture starts with treating developers as people, not headcount.
Open source pays forward
The ecosystem gave me a career. Contributing back is how I pay it forward.
Let's work together
Whether you need a code review, a custom app, or a senior advisor — I'm here to help.