Aldea
Backend Engineer
About the Project
Aldea (formerly WellChild) is a healthcare platform that connects Florida families in Miami and Orlando with pediatric specialists — ABA therapists, speech therapists, and clinical psychologists. The platform helps parents find providers by location, service type, and insurance coverage, eliminating the typical months-long search process. It spans three applications: a patient and provider app, an internal admin console, and a NestJS API. I worked as the backend engineer responsible for the core API, provider matching system, and data infrastructure.
Key Highlights
- Built the provider directory API with advanced filtering by location, specialty, and insurance
- Implemented HIPAA-compliant data handling for sensitive patient information, with 2FA, Helmet, and request throttling
- Designed the provider matching algorithm that connects families with relevant therapists
- Built the waitlist management system on Bull/Redis queues, with Socket.io for live booking updates
- Integrated insurance verification, Stripe billing, S3 document storage, and SendGrid notification workflows
Technical Challenges
Working in healthcare means every data decision has compliance implications. Implementing HIPAA-compliant data storage and access controls while maintaining a fast, responsive API required careful planning around encryption at rest, audit logging, and role-based access control. The API also runs a mixed persistence model — relational data through Prisma and PostgreSQL, document-shaped clinical records through MongoDB — which meant being deliberate about which store owned which entity.