Two audiences, one schema
The CMS needs everything; the public site must never leak drafts or internal notes. Rather than duplicating the catalogue, visibility is enforced at the query layer with separate read models over the same collections.
All work
One backend serving a CMS and a streaming front-end
Jolt
- Role
- Backend lead
- Year
- 2025
- Impact
- One backend, two products
Overview
Jolt is two products on one spine. Internally it is a CMS where the team ingests films, writes metadata, manages categories and controls what goes live. Externally it is a public streaming interface where audiences browse and watch.
Both read the same MongoDB catalogue, which means an editorial change is visible on the public site without a sync job or a second source of truth.
What I built
- Led the backend for both surfaces — Express API boundaries over one shared MongoDB model, with separate permission layers.
- Built the film ingestion and metadata pipeline, including encoding status tracking through to publish.
- Implemented range-request video delivery for seek-friendly playback.
- Modelled publishing state so drafts, scheduled and live content are the same documents under different visibility rules.
- Integrated Auth0 for identity, so the editorial team and public viewers authenticate through one managed provider instead of a hand-rolled login.
The hard parts
Two audiences, one identity provider
Editors and viewers are the same Auth0 tenant but must not share permissions. Roles come off the token and map to the API's own permission layer, so a viewer session can never reach a CMS route even when the login is identical.
Seeking without buffering
Video is served over HTTP range requests so the player can jump to any timestamp without pulling the whole file, which cut both seek time and bandwidth on long films.
Encoding is slow, the UI is not
Upload and encode are decoupled from the request cycle. The CMS tracks per-film processing state so editors see accurate progress and cannot publish something still mid-encode.
Outcomes
- Products, one backend
- 2
- Editorial to live
- Instant
- Streaming delivery
- Range
Stack
- Node.js
- Express
- MongoDB
- Video Streaming
- CMS
- Auth0