What the work actually is
You are not maintaining one codebase. You are repeatedly building new applications from an empty directory to something that runs, across business domains you may not have worked in before — inventory management, appointment scheduling, ticketing, analytics dashboards, approval workflows. Each build is expected to be genuinely functional rather than a mock: real schema, real queries, working auth, Redis doing something meaningful (caching, sessions, pub/sub for live updates), and UI that a user could actually operate. The value to the model comes from breadth of architectural pattern, so repeating the same CRUD skeleton with different table names is the failure mode the reviewers watch for.
What the screen looks for
AfterQuery's screening leans on depth under follow-up rather than credential checks. Expect to be pushed on schema design decisions (why a join table here, what indexes, how you'd handle a slow query), on where Redis belongs versus where it's cargo cult, and on Next.js specifics — server components versus client, route handlers, caching and revalidation behaviour, what actually renders on the server. Vague framework name-dropping gets caught quickly. Being able to describe a system you built end to end, including the parts that went wrong, matters more than years of tenure.
Logistics
- Fully remote and asynchronous; work is delivered as repositories against briefs rather than tickets in a sprint.
- Contract and hourly. Observed rates for this listing sit in the $60–100/hr range, typically scaled to demonstrated depth and throughput — not guaranteed, and not a salary band.
- Hours are flexible, but throughput is visible: builds have delivery windows, and consistent part-time availability (roughly 15–20+ hrs/week) is generally more useful to the platform than sporadic bursts.
- Minimum bar stated as 2+ years of professional full-stack experience.