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Micheal Macaulay — home

Open to senior backend rolesLagos, Nigeria · UTC+1

Backends that other people’s money, mail and models run on.

I’m Micheal Macaulay — a backend engineer in Lagos. 5 years in Node.js, NestJS and TypeScript, mostly on the parts that are expensive to get wrong: payment integrations, email infrastructure, and the API contracts other teams build against.

See the workRead the CVGet in touch →

Full overlap with London and Dublin. Afternoons overlap New York.

Micheal Macaulay standing in front of two monitors showing code
GET /v1/me200 OK
{
  "name": "Micheal Macaulay",
  "role": "Senior Backend Engineer",
  "based": "Lagos, Nigeria",
  "years": 5,
  "stack": [
    "NestJS",
    "Node.js",
    "TypeScript"
  ]
}

Measured outcomes

Three numbers, not eleven. These are the ones I can reconstruct on a call — the instrument, the baseline and the window. The rest of my work is described by what it does rather than by a percentage.

Selected work

All projects →

Experience

Full CV →

Working with AI

I have shipped model-backed features into three clients’ production workflows, across text, vision and speech. The interesting engineering is never the API call — it is everything around it.

Shipped into production

How I actually use it

Where I use it
Daily, across the stack — scaffolding, unfamiliar APIs, test cases I would otherwise skip, and frontend work that is not my strongest suit. It is why I can take a full-stack ticket end to end rather than handing the UI to someone else.
Where I don’t
Schema design, auth boundaries, anything touching money, and any decision I would have to defend in a review. Not because a model cannot suggest one, but because I have to be able to explain why it is right, and reconstructing that after the fact is slower than deciding it up front.
The rule I hold to
I don’t ship what I can’t explain. That is the same rule this site runs on — the case studies stay unpublished until I have described the systems in my own words, rather than filling them with a plausible account of what they probably did.
What it doesn’t change
Reviewing a diff you did not type is still reviewing a diff. The failure mode is accepting something that looks right, and the defence is the same as it has always been: types, tests, and reading the thing before it goes in.

About

Most of what I build is invisible when it works. That is the job.

I started in electrical engineering and moved to backend work because the problems were more interesting: a payment that must not be charged twice, a mailbox sync that has to survive being interrupted, an API that half a dozen people are already building against.

I work with teams across the UK, Europe and the US from Lagos, which means my day already overlaps most of theirs. What I care about in a codebase is whether the next person can read it — so I document the contract, keep the error shapes consistent, and write the test that proves the thing I claimed.

Right now I’m deepening the operational side — the metrics, tracing and alerting I have not had to run before. There is a page on this site that says plainly what I have and have not done.

Micheal Macaulay seated at a desk in an open-plan office

Contact

If you’re hiring for a backend or platform role, or you have a system that needs untangling, send me the details. This form posts to the NestJS API documented alongside this site — validated, rate limited, and stored before it is emailed, so nothing gets lost on the way.

or email macaulaymich@gmail.com