Full-Stack Web Developer — Wire an Existing React Chat Widget to a Secure Backend (1-2 Day Project)

**About us** House of Horror Haunted Carnival is Miami's largest haunted attraction, now in its 25th year. Our 2026 season opens September 24 at Tropical Park. We do the majority of our ticket sales same-day, to a heavily Spanish-speaking local audience, so our website has to answer questions fast on a phone at 5 PM on a Saturday. **The project** We have a working React chat widget already built — a bilingual (English/Spanish) visitor concierge that answers questions about hours, tickets, and attractions, and links to the right ticket page. It currently calls the Anthropic API directly from the browser, which is fine for a demo and unacceptable in production. Your job is to take it live: 1. Stand up a small server-side endpoint on our infrastructure that holds our API key and proxies requests to the Anthropic API. 2. Repoint the widget at that endpoint and remove the client-side key and prompt. 3. Add basic protections: rate limiting, CORS restriction, input validation, graceful failure. 4. Wire a small JSON schedule file that drives an "open tonight" indicator, so our staff can edit closed dates without a developer. 5. Add UTM tagging and analytics events on ticket-link clicks. 6. Test on real iOS and Android phones and hand off code in a repo we own. We have a written build spec covering the architecture, the endpoint, the schedule logic, and a QA checklist. We'll share it with shortlisted candidates. This is a well-defined project, not an open-ended research task. **You should have** - Solid JavaScript/React, plus server-side experience (Node, PHP, or serverless functions) - Shipped and deployed API endpoints before, on a live site - Working understanding of environment variables, CORS, and rate limiting - Comfort testing mobile-first on real devices - Clear communication and fast turnaround Experience with the Anthropic or OpenAI APIs is a plus but not required — this is a standard HTTP integration. **No machine learning, model training, or AI infrastructure work is involved.** Please don't propose a chatbot platform, a vector database, or a rebuild; the widget is finished and we like it. **Timeline & terms** - Fixed price. Please quote your number and your hours. - Delivered and tested on staging within 2 weeks of start; live no later than **September 1, 2026**. - We'd like the option to keep you on a small retainer for the season (Sept 24 – Nov 1) for quick fixes. Say whether you're open to that. - All code delivered to a repository we own. The API account and key stay in our name. **To apply, answer these three questions in your proposal** (proposals without answers won't be reviewed): 1. Where does the API key belong, and why? 2. If the site needs to know we're closed on a specific date, how would you handle that? 3. Briefly, what have you deployed that's most like this? Please also tell us your availability on evenings and weekends during opening weekend (Sept 24–27).