08 / Dating & bookings
Mingle Pringle
A UK dating and matchmaking platform with escrow-backed bookings, a matchmaker portal with commission payouts, and a super-admin.
- Role
- Backend lead
- Status
- Client project
- Period
- 2026
- Type
- Dating & bookings
- audit trails: money, state, admin
- 3
- step onboarding flow
- 18
A / Architecture
Modular API with an escrow state machine
A NestJS API with strict module boundaries — matching, bookings, payments, verification — where money and state changes are audited at every step.
00 Clients
- Mobile apps
- Web · Next.js
- Matchmaker portal
- Super-admin
01 Edge
- REST · cursor pagination
- Socket.IO chat
- Throttling
- Presigned uploads
02 API modules
- Matching
- Bookings · escrow
- Payments
- Verification
- Matchmaking commissions
03 Events
- Payment webhooks
- In-app purchase events
- Push · email
04 Data
- PostgreSQL
- Prisma 7
- Money · state · admin audit
- Object storage
Engineering notes
- 01
Escrow as a state machine
Pending → confirmed → in progress → completed, with explicit branches for cancellations and disputes. Money in minor units throughout.
- 02
Payments on every rail
Stripe cards, subscriptions and Connect payouts on the web; RevenueCat for in-app purchases.
- 03
Trust built in
Face and government-ID verification, realtime chat over Socket.IO and audit tables for money, state transitions and admin actions.
B / Infrastructure & delivery
How it ships, scales and stays up.
- Cloud
- AWS for compute and container images; S3-compatible object storage for media.
- CI/CD
- GitHub Actions builds, pushes and deploys to AWS automatically, with team notifications.
- Payments
- Stripe cards, subscriptions and Connect payouts; RevenueCat for in-app purchases; all money in minor units.
- Trust
- Face and government-ID verification; audit tables for money, state transitions and admin actions.
- Contracts
- Global response and exception envelopes; cursor pagination everywhere; rate limiting on public routes.
- Process
- Spec-driven delivery with written specs and steering documents per feature.