Building a rideshare platform from zero to first deploy

Company context

A transportation technology startup building a rideshare platform for both independent drivers and fleet-managed companies. The business model combines B2C driver subscriptions with B2B fleet management fees, avoiding the traditional commission-per-ride model. The founding team had a clear vision and a development partner, but no codebase or cloud infrastructure.

The challenge

The team needed to go from zero to a deployable platform that could support:

• Three client applications (rider mobile app, driver mobile app, company management web app)
• Multi-role authentication across all three clients
• Stripe payment infrastructure for subscriptions and eventual ride payments
• A provider-agnostic AI service for future NLP-powered ride requests
• Cloud infrastructure that could scale from prototype to production

The development partner had backend engineers ready to build features, but there was no architecture to build on. No monorepo, no shared types, no database schema, no deployment pipeline, no infrastructure-as-code. Every feature would be blocked until the foundation existed.

What I did

Architecture design and roadmap.

I mapped the entire product into 42 prioritized roadmap items organized by dependency chain: authentication first, then payments, then business logic, then ride operations. Each item got a detailed plan file specifying the schema changes, API endpoints, validation rules, and edge cases. These plans were shared with the development team as implementation specs.

Authentication across three clients.

Built a custom JWT authentication system with bcrypt password hashing, refresh token rotation, and client-specific guards. Each client (driver app, rider app, company web) gets its own authentication context via JWT payload. Registration automatically creates the corresponding profile (driver, passenger, or manager). Protected routes use role-specific guards so drivers cannot access company endpoints and vice versa.

Stripe subscription billing.

Implemented the full subscription lifecycle: company creation with Stripe Customer, subscription checkout via Stripe-hosted pages, webhook handlers for status changes (created, updated, deleted, payment failed), and local database caching. Company owners manage subscriptions; managers and drivers cannot. The system treats Stripe as the source of truth and keeps the local database in sync via webhooks.

Fixed 30+ issues during pre-merge review: idempotent database migrations, safe charge handling for edge cases, auth guard gaps, and missing test coverage.

Provider-agnostic LLM service.

Built a global NestJS module that abstracts Anthropic and OpenAI behind a single interface. Supports text completion and structured output (via Zod schemas mapped to tool use). Includes timeout enforcement, error mapping to HTTP exceptions, and runtime provider selection via environment variable. This will power text-based ride requests where passengers describe where they want to go in natural language.

GCE infrastructure with Terraform.

Provisioned the complete cloud environment: GCE instance with Container-Optimized OS running two Docker containers (API and web), Cloud SQL PostgreSQL with managed backups, Cloud SQL Auth Proxy sidecar, global HTTPS load balancer with managed SSL, path-based routing (API vs. web), Secret Manager for credential injection, and a Managed Instance Group with auto-healing and health checks.

Set up Identity-Aware Proxy for staging access (Google sign-in required) with webhook endpoints bypassing IAP. Deploy script builds Docker images, pushes to Artifact Registry with git SHA tags, and triggers rolling updates for zero-downtime deploys.

Handled the GCP project transfer from a personal account to the company's Google Cloud organization with proper billing, IAM, and remote Terraform state backend.

Results

This engagement is ongoing. Here is what has been delivered so far:

• Built the entire platform from scratch: monorepo with NestJS API, Next.js web app, and Expo mobile app scaffolding
• Delivered JWT authentication with multi-client support (driver, rider, company manager)
• Shipped Stripe subscription billing with full webhook lifecycle and extensive pre-merge fixes across auth, payments, and migrations
• Built a provider-agnostic LLM service supporting Anthropic and OpenAI with structured output
• Provisioned GCE infrastructure with load balancer, managed SSL, Cloud SQL, and zero-downtime deploys
• Created 42 roadmap items with detailed plan files covering 18+ months of development
• Transferred GCP project to company organization with proper IAM and Terraform state

What comes next: ride-booking core (map, matching, live tracking), payment processing with Stripe Connect (driver and company payouts), multi-tenant row-level security, push notifications, and the admin dashboard.

Testimonial

"We had the business plan but no technical foundation. Nico designed the architecture, built the critical infrastructure, and gave our dev team a clear roadmap they could execute against. We went from nothing to a deployed platform with auth and payments in a matter of weeks."