I'm Punit Sethi.

India

With 14+ years of experience (and 7+ years freelancing), I've worked with teams to build B2C platforms. Most of my work is with React frontends and Node backends. This includes undertaking complex migrations, improving web performance, making systems scalable, and improving cloud infrastructure management. Plus, I have deep expertise in Strapi CMS.

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Areas of Expertise

Node, Express, Koa

React, Next.js

Strapi CMS

Scaling systems
(caching, async, materialized views)

Core Web Vitals
(NewRelic, WebPageTest, performance optimization)

AWS / Google Cloud Services
(serverless, cost optimization, monitoring)

ElasticSearch

Kibana APM

RabbitMQ, AWS SQS

Tech SEO compliant coding

WordPress

Postgres, MySQL

Clients

Recent Client Projects

React App - Fixing Render Performance Issues

Root caused and fixed input lag and sluggish data rendering issues

June, 2025

This React App (a customized Strapi CMS admin UI) consisted of forms with hundreds of fields, leading to noticable input lag and sluggish data rendering.

Root caused the libraries and logic causing performance issues.
Delivered code changes to overcome the issues without replacing existing UI libraries (via Debouncing mechanism) to ensure minimal changes.

Proof of Concept - Gen AI chatbot

Built a RAG pipeline to assess effort and challenges in developing a Gen AI chatbot

Mar, 2025 - Apr, 2025

This was for a B2C site that wanted to know the feasibility of building a Gen AI chatbot for their visitors.

Evaluated UI pipeline tools (Kotaemon, Dify), Vector databases (Qdrant, Milvus) and Embedding models (OpenAI text-embedding models) needed to build the RAG pipeline.
Built MCP server for a few in-house APIs to understand deeper integration possibilities.
Delivered a working proof-of-concept Gen AI chatbot with data ingested from 2k web pages along with inputs on needed aspects (tech choices, key quality challenges, effort required to develop further on various capabilities).

Lead Consultant - Strapi v5, Next.js v13 website

Handling business logic implementation, reliability, performance

Oct, 2023 - Mar, 2025

As the senior-most individual contributor within the team, I'm responsible for:

Solving scalability, security, performance, reliability issues.
Coding the core-business-logic aspects within the backend APIs & cron jobs.
Interfacing with various teams (business, users, support, devops) to ensure adequate requirements implementation.
Strapi v4 -> Strapi v5 upgrade executed in Q4, 2024.

Head of Engineering - Node, PHP, React, AWS, MySQL

Over-all responsible for tech - reporting to the founder CEO for a major Indian eComm platform (3m+ visitors per month)

Dec, 2023 - Dec, 2024

Having worked with this team twice in the past, their CEO offered me an opportunity to head the in-house engineering team & own the over-all tech platform!

Made the product more reliable through better monitoring and observability along with better tech-debt prioritization. This, in-turn improved the team productivity.
Solved deep tech issues around scalability (better caching, queries tuning), security (cloud policies), bug-free releases (non-production environments workflow) and performance (core web vitals).
Drove a team environment of transparency, professional growth & learning to drive improved results along with a higher team satisfaction.
Ensured an agile execution in sync with the expectations of the founders, product management, sales and marketing teams.

Gatsby.js => Next.js 13 (App router) migration

Mentored migrating a frontend from Gatsby v5 to Next.js v13

Oct, 2023 - Nov, 2023

While the in-house frontend team executed the actual migration, I provided Next.js v13 specific guidance:

Setup data fetching, ISR, cache invalidation and content preview mechanisms in-line with the content team's requirements.
Provided a path to upgrade the existing pages using Chakra UI to React Server Components (Next.js App router).

Backend Cloud Migration (AWS => Azure)

Migrated a Strapi setup from AWS to Azure services

Aug, 2023 - Sep, 2023

This Strapi setup (in production for 1.5 years) leveraged various AWS services (S3, Cloudfront, SQS, SES). The project involved:

Modifying code to leverage the equivalent Azure services (while handling Cloud provider specific differences).
Migrating the existing data & files from AWS to Azure.
Performing the storage migration (Terrabytes worth of data) with a minimal downtime via feature-flag driven development.

Strapi Upgrade

Undertook v3 => v4 upgrade for a complicated CMS setup

May, 2023 - July, 2023

This Strapi upgrade was more complicated than the ones I executed earlier:

The setup (in use since 2019) had many data inconsistencies (orphan records, foreign key violations) needing pre & post data-processing.
The large number of dynamic zones & relationships transated ~60 collection types into ~1k postgres tables being migrated.
The global all-remote team with members working in many timezones demanded prompt communication for a timely execution.

Angular Frontend Optimizations

Identified optimizations & mentored the in-house team on implementation

Jan, 2023 - Feb, 2023

Having worked with on this eComm org's site speed & scalability earlier, their CTO tasked me to identify & mentor the execution of industry best practices wrt. their Angular frontend:

Identified the gaps in aspects like PWA push notifications, Angular universal implementation, in-the-wild error tracking among others.
Mentored the org's in-house frontend team to implement the identified gaps.

Strapi Customizations

Undertook data migration & customization for an Enterprise CMS setup

Nov, 2022 - Aug, 2023

Being the primary go-to backend person on this project, here's a few major items I have implemented so far:

Undertook data migration to move from an in-house CMS to Strapi.
Implemented a custom access-control for Strapi Rest APIs to securely serve sensitive data.
Implemented single sign-on, custom plugins, integration with self-hosted search, etc.

Core web vitals Optimization

Improved site speed for a Wordpress based marketing site

Oct, 2022 - Nov, 2022

Other than improving the site speed, this engagement involved reviewing the hosting infrastructure & educating the team on site speed aspects:

Introduced the Cloudflare CDN & Wordpress full-page caching to improve the server response speed.
Configured image optimization + caching for faster image loading.

CMS Framework Selection

Undertook a proof-of-concept to identify suitable CMS framework

Nov, 2022 - Dec, 2022

Having worked on multiple initiatives for this B2C org, I was tasked to provide tech inputs wrt. selecting JS based headless CMS framework:

Gathered must-have & good-to-have requirements from various stakeholders.
Initial evaluation led us to Directus & Strapi for a more detailed PoC.
Undertook a PoC implementation of the must-have requirements & provided the tech feedback.

View All Client Projects ⇒