The Speed Team
Senior engineers, working together since 2015

Speed isn't a score. It's how fast you can grow.

We're a tight team of senior engineers who've worked together since 2015, rebuilding the infrastructure behind high-traffic WooCommerce stores. The store that can't scale is almost always held back by a platform that was never built to. We find what's slowing the business down, and rebuild it.

Get in touch See the work
Annual revenue, one platform
Built and run by us, end to end
$80Mfrom $0
WooCommerce storefrontNestJS services behind itOwned through years of growth
Together since 2015 same core team
Built & ran $0 → $80M a platform, end to end
Under our care $2M+/mo in live store revenue
Track record 100% JSS Top Rated Plus on Upwork
DTC e-commerceDown & hacked→+60% revenueReal-time device networkDies at 100 users→Holds under loadLottery platform, AustraliaDaily outages→Stable & monitored15-site WooCommerce multisiteStalled & slow→Headless & fastHealth startupGreenfield→$80M ARRHigh-risk merchant, USAPlatform limits→Largest in its nicheAI voice platformEarly-stage→Production-grade
What we mean by speed

Three kinds of fast, and only one of them is a PageSpeed score.

Speed to scale

Grow without breaking

Infrastructure that keeps up as revenue climbs, instead of becoming the ceiling your growth hits.

Speed under load

Hold on your biggest day

Caching, queries, and architecture that stay fast and resilient when the traffic actually arrives.

Speed to ship

Move faster as a team

A clean platform and the right tooling so shipping the next feature takes days, not quarters.

Services

What we take responsibility for

Most clients don't need a freelancer to close tickets. They need a partner accountable for outcomes across the whole picture: the architecture, the integrations, the team, the roadmap.

01 Performance & scale

Performance & scale engineering

Not just PageSpeed scores. The database queries, caching strategy, and infrastructure decisions that keep a platform fast and standing on its biggest day.

02 Architecture

WooCommerce architecture & custom builds

Custom checkout flows, subscription systems, complex pricing logic, and custom plugin development well beyond what off-the-shelf can do.

03 Re-architecture

Platform re-architecture

When a store outgrows WordPress, we move the heavy logic (inventory, pricing, order processing) into dedicated NestJS microservices. WooCommerce stays the storefront; the load moves elsewhere.

04 Rescue

Emergency stabilization & security

Downtime, repeated hacks, malware, a site that buckles under load. We diagnose the real cause and make it stop, then harden it so it stays fixed.

05 Systems

Internal tools & automation

Tools your team actually uses, workflows that remove manual overhead, and integrations that connect the stack you already run, plus AI features where they add real leverage.

06 Leadership

Fractional CTO & technical leadership

Stepping in as your de facto CTO or architect: leading dev teams, reviewing code, and owning the hard decisions that keep complex projects on track.

07 Tracking & data

Tracking & marketing integrations

When the numbers your ad platforms report stop matching reality, we fix it at the source. We work directly with the Meta, Google Ads, GA4, GTM and Triple Whale APIs: server-side tracking, conversion APIs, and the pixel and tag troubleshooting that keeps attribution accurate. The result: marketing spend aimed at real data instead of guesses, and a measurement layer you can actually trust.

The business is ready to scale. The infrastructure is what's holding it back.

That's the pattern in almost all of our work. WooCommerce is usually where the conversation starts, but the higher-leverage work is the layer underneath: the architecture, the automation, and the custom engineering that no plugin will ever cover.

Field records, selected work

What the work actually looks like

Every engagement starts the same way: find the real bottleneck, then rebuild it. A few from the file.

E-commerce · DTC · profitable but bleeding +60% revenue in a single year Down & hacked→+60% revenue

A profitable store that couldn't stay online

Symptom
Constant downtime and repeated hacks. The store made money but kept falling over, and Core Web Vitals were failing across the board.
Diagnosis
A tangle of plugins on a misconfigured server, plus unpatched vulnerabilities that kept inviting malware back in.
Intervention
Cleaned up the infrastructure so it stopped crashing, closed the security holes, and took PageSpeed and Core Web Vitals from red to green. Only then could the CRO, Klaviyo, GTM and Triple Whale work do its job on a foundation that could finally hold.
Outcome
+60% revenue in a single year.
Venture-backed · real-time infrastructure Holds under sustained real-time load Dies at 100 users→Holds under load

Thousands of devices, and a site that buckled at 100 users

Symptom
A funded company ran a real-time network of thousands of connected devices across North America, yet their own site buckled at around 100 concurrent users.
Diagnosis
It was never a traffic problem. There was no caching layer, and the server had never been properly configured or owned by anyone.
Intervention
Rebuilt the infrastructure to hold under real load and keep running as they grew, instead of degrading every time they scaled.
Outcome
A stable platform under sustained real-time load.
Real-money lottery · Australia · down daily Monitored stable, with Cloudflare in front Daily outages→Stable & monitored

A lottery platform that went down almost every day

Symptom
An Australian real-money lottery whose platform went down almost daily, the kind of unreliability that costs revenue and trust with every outage.
Diagnosis
No version control and no monitoring, so nobody could see problems coming or trace what broke. The server was infected with malware and wide open to bot traffic, and the incumbent dev team couldn't stop the bleeding.
Intervention
Put the codebase under proper version control with GitHub, stood up New Relic so issues surfaced before they became outages, hunted down and fixed the bottlenecks, cleaned out the viruses, and placed Cloudflare in front for bot protection. Then took over from the dev team that had let it get there.
Outcome
A stable platform, and an owner who stopped wondering whether the site would be up tomorrow.
Headless WooCommerce · 15-site multisite 15 sites headless on Next.js, live and fast Stalled & slow→15 sites, headless & fast

A stalled 15-site build, rescued and rebuilt headless

Symptom
The client needed a 15-site WooCommerce multisite built, and had been paying a previous team for months with nothing usable to show for it. The front end they had was on Elementor, and it was slow.
Diagnosis
There was no real engineering behind the stalled build, and Elementor's overhead was never going to deliver the speed a network of storefronts needs.
Intervention
We took the project over, built the full 15-site WooCommerce multisite, and rebuilt the front end headless on Next.js. Then we wired up custom Meta and Google tracking through Triple Whale, so the whole network's attribution was accurate from day one.
Outcome
A headless network that loads far faster than the Elementor build it replaced. 15 storefronts, live and fast.
Health startup · platform owner $80M annual revenue, from $0 Greenfield / $0→$80M ARR

A platform built to survive the growth it enabled

Symptom
A health startup with plans to scale fast, and no commerce platform built to survive that kind of growth.
Diagnosis
Off-the-shelf wouldn't hold. The commerce layer needed to be owned end to end, not assembled from parts.
Intervention
Built and owned the platform through years of growth: architecture, integrations, and the hard scaling decisions, including moving critical logic out of WordPress into dedicated NestJS microservices where the load demanded it.
Outcome
$0 → $80M in annual revenue.
High-risk merchant · USA · multi-year partnership #1 largest store in its niche Platform limits→Largest in its niche

Years of custom engineering that built a category leader

Symptom
A high-risk US merchant trying to scale in a niche where WooCommerce simply didn't do what they needed. Every gain in speed and conversion had to be fought for, second by second.
Diagnosis
The features that would actually drive growth (the checkout, the merchandising, the back-office systems) didn't exist on the platform yet. And high-risk payments meant fragile gateways and failing orders that off-the-shelf tooling simply ignored.
Intervention
Over several years we built what the market didn't have. A Shopify-style multi-step checkout on WooCommerce before that was a thing anywhere. The first proper mini-cart, upsells and bundles on the platform, back in 2018 and 2019. A custom inventory system, sales forecasting, and a bespoke ERP. Plus multiple high-risk payment gateways, including custom API work to track and recover failing orders, and relentless, incremental performance gains the whole way through.
Outcome
The store became the largest in its niche.
AI voice platform · USA · Founding Engineer · 2025 to present Shipped prototype to production-grade Early-stage→Production-grade

Founding engineer on an enterprise AI voice platform

Role
Joined as founding engineer to bring an early-stage AI voice platform for enterprise phone automation to production standards.
Scope
Architecture stabilization, codebase refactoring, MCP integrations, Databricks data-pipeline integration, and workflow-automation engine development, bringing the platform up to production standards along the way.
Platform
Real-time voice AI at sub-second latency, inbound and outbound campaign management, CRM integrations, and full API infrastructure. Built on Next.js.
Impact
An early prototype turned into a production-grade platform ready for enterprise phone automation at scale.

More case studies available on request.

Since 2015

A team, not a marketplace gamble.

We've worked together since 2015. The same senior engineers, not a rotating cast of subcontractors assembled per project. That continuity is the whole point: complex platforms need people who remember why every decision was made, and who'll still be here when it matters.

We take on a small number of clients at a time, so each one gets partners who are genuinely accountable for outcomes. Not a ticket queue, and not a single freelancer who disappears when they're on holiday. If you're building something that needs to last, that's the kind of team it takes.

Paul Samsonov
Paul Samsonov
Founding Engineer
Serhii Zhytariuk
Serhii Zhytariuk
Product Engineer
Vlad Malakhov
Vlad Malakhov
Product Engineer
Upwork Top Rated Plus
100%
Job Success Score
244
Total jobs
47,399
Total hours
“Paul is a strong performance engineer. His main focus was WooCommerce speed optimisation, caching, script handling and page load, and site speed improved noticeably as a result. He also handled a database migration and a range of backend fixes on a complex subscription setup. Clear communicator, works fast, and good at finding the real cause of a slow page rather than guessing. Recommended.”
WooCommerce subscription business, Upwork, 2026

Read every review on the Upwork profile

The stack

Plus whatever the problem calls for.

PHP
JavaScript
React
Node.js
NestJS
WooCommerce
WordPress
Next.js
GTM
GA4
Meta CAPI
Cloudflare
New Relic
TWTriple Whale

Growing faster than your platform can handle?

Tell us where it's slowing down. We work with a small number of clients at a time. If it's a fit, let's talk.

Start a conversation Also on Upwork
Hours
Working worldwide, overlapping US and EU business hours
Who replies
One of the three engineers, not an account manager