Node.js Backend Development

Why Node.js for Your Backend

Node.js excels at I/O-bound workloads — API servers that talk to databases, external services, and file systems. Its single-threaded event loop handles thousands of concurrent connections efficiently, making it an excellent choice for API gateways, real-time servers, and data aggregation services.

The JavaScript/TypeScript ecosystem also means your frontend and backend share a language, types, and validation schemas. With tools like Zod, you define a validation schema once and use it on both client and server, eliminating an entire category of integration bugs.

Node.js is not the right choice for CPU-intensive computation — machine learning inference, image processing, or complex mathematical operations. For those workloads, we reach for Python or Go. But for the vast majority of web backend requirements, Node.js with TypeScript is our recommendation.

Our Backend Architecture Patterns

We structure Node.js applications using a clean architecture approach: routes handle HTTP concerns, controllers orchestrate business logic, services contain domain operations, and repositories abstract data access. This separation makes the codebase testable, maintainable, and easy to evolve.

For data access, we use Prisma as our default ORM — its type-safe queries, migration system, and schema definition language eliminate an enormous amount of boilerplate and make database changes safe. For performance-critical queries, we drop to raw SQL with pg or mysql2 drivers.

Error handling follows a consistent pattern: domain errors are typed and intentional, infrastructure errors are caught and logged with context, and every error response includes a correlation ID for debugging. We use structured JSON logging with Pino for fast, searchable log output.

Scaling and Security

Scaling a Node.js application starts with understanding your bottlenecks. We use clinic.js and 0x for profiling, identify hot paths, and optimize where it actually matters. For horizontal scaling, we design stateless services that can run behind a load balancer. Session data lives in Redis, file uploads go to S3, and background jobs are processed by worker instances pulling from a shared queue.

Every Node.js application we build includes security fundamentals: Helmet for HTTP headers, CORS configuration, rate limiting with sliding window algorithms, input validation on every endpoint, and parameterized queries to prevent SQL injection. For authentication, we implement proper bcrypt password hashing, secure JWT handling with rotation, and OAuth 2.0 flows with PKCE for frontend applications.