Built the API middleware that let a B2B SaaS offer data integration as a first-class product feature.

An early-stage B2B SaaS company whose product needed to offer data integration capabilities to their customers. Building that from scratch wasn't their core competency, so they needed someone to stand up the infrastructure that wrapped Airbyte's API into something their frontend could call cleanly.

Airbyte gave them the integration engine, but their product needed a polished layer between their frontend application and Airbyte's API. Going direct at Airbyte meant exposing too much complexity to end users and too many failure modes to support. They needed OAuth flow handling, source and destination configuration, normalized request and response formats, and an admin interface their team could operate. On top of that, they needed BigQuery destinations with GCS staging as the default loading method, tested and documented for their customers.

The scale of the problem mattered as much as the shape of it. The team was already shipping their core product roadmap; they didn't have the bandwidth to take a six-month detour into integration infrastructure. They needed someone who could land a working middleware quickly, transfer it cleanly, and not leave behind a black-box dependency that would slow them down for the next year.

The Blueprint phase ran in three weeks: scoping the middleware contract with their frontend lead, mapping the OAuth flow end-to-end across the source platforms they cared about, and identifying the destination configurations needed for launch. We came out with a tight API surface document and a sequenced backlog so the Build could ship value every two weeks rather than landing as one big handoff at the end.

Through the three-month Build, we paired with their backend engineer in twice-weekly working sessions, with code review running asynchronously on GitHub. We deliberately mirrored their existing engineering patterns (Python conventions, repo structure, deploy approach) so the middleware would feel native after handoff rather than like a foreign body their team would resent maintaining.

Knowledge transfer was the deliverable, not an afterthought. By month two, their backend engineer was reviewing our PRs and merging them. By month three, he was opening his own PRs against the codebase. We delivered a runbook covering common failure modes, the admin UI for debugging, and a CI/CD pipeline configured for their team. The day we wrapped, they shipped the next feature themselves.

• Clean API surface their frontend team built against without touching Airbyte directly
• 40+ customer integrations running through the middleware in production
• BigQuery destination with GCS staging available as a first-class option for their customers
• Admin UI gave their team real-time visibility to debug customer integration issues
• CI/CD to Heroku so their team could ship changes independently