Backend Engineering & API Development
Ship secure, scalable backends and APIs with clear contracts, observability, and cost-aware architectures.
Strong contracts, observable systems, predictable costs. We design backends that are easy to reason about and safe to evolve.
Capabilities
- Service design: monolith‑first when it makes sense, microservices when it doesn’t hurt.
- APIs: REST, GraphQL, gRPC—with quotas, schema evolution, and clear ownership.
- Datastores: Postgres for sanity, Redis for speed, ClickHouse for crunching, Kafka for choreography.
- Languages: Elixir for concurrency, TypeScript for safety, Python and Ruby when velocity matters.
- Observability: Metrics, logs, traces. No mysteries, just signals.
“If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, you don’t know what you’re doing.”
—W. Edwards Deming
Deliverables
- API Contracts — spec-first, versioned, and testable.
- Migrations with safety nets — rollbackable, repeatable, human-readable.
- Resilience by design — retries, idempotency, circuit breakers that actually break.
- Security layers — from the edge to the core: rate limits, scopes, secrets, and audits.
- Runbooks — not just for ops, but for sleep.
Example outcome (anonymized)
A global payments platform transitioned from unstructured endpoints to a contract-first API architecture. Added idempotency keys, retry-safe handlers, and a queue-backed webhook system. Incident volume dropped by 63%, and onboarding time for new developers fell by half.
“The opposite of a good idea can also be a good idea.”
—Rory Sutherland
FAQs
Do you support HIPAA or PCI use cases?
Yes. We help map data flows, define scopes, and document threat models for audits.
How do you avoid breaking downstream consumers?
Contract testing, semver discipline, and staged rollouts.
Can you handle large-scale migrations?
Yes. We favor compatibility-first strategies with toggles, dual-writes, and measurable rollout plans.