Backend & APIs
Scalable server architecture that powers your applications reliably.
We architect and build the server-side systems that power your applications. From monolithic APIs to distributed microservices, we design for reliability, performance, and maintainability at any scale.
Quick Overview
Timeline
4-30 weeks
Starting At
$8,000
Capabilities
12 core capabilities
Engagement
Free consultation
Overview
What We Do & Why It Matters
Your backend is the machinery that decides whether your product is fast, reliable, and affordable to run, or slow, flaky, and eating your margin. We have spent years designing and building APIs and server systems for founders launching a single monolith that has to scale with them, mid-market teams breaking up a legacy codebase into services, and enterprises consolidating a sprawl of internal systems onto a coherent platform. We design for the actual load, not the pitch-deck load, and we build for the team that will maintain it after we leave.
Our default stack is Node.js with TypeScript for most API workloads, Python with FastAPI when the workload is data-heavy or the team already lives in Python, and Go when raw throughput and low memory footprint matter. The database is almost always PostgreSQL because it is the most capable general-purpose database in production today, with Redis for caching and rate limiting, and a message bus like SQS, RabbitMQ, or NATS for asynchronous work. We reach for specialized tools like ClickHouse, TimescaleDB, or a graph database only when the evidence calls for it.
We design APIs before we build them. Every engagement starts with an API contract written in OpenAPI or as a GraphQL schema, reviewed with your front-end team and any external consumers, and checked into a repository that becomes the source of truth. Type-safe clients are generated automatically in TypeScript, Python, and Swift from that contract, so a breaking change in the server shows up as a failing build in every consumer rather than a 2 AM incident. We use tRPC or GraphQL with code generation when the client and server are owned by the same team for end-to-end type safety with almost no runtime cost.
Database design matters more than framework choice. We spend real time on schema modeling, normalization trade-offs, index strategy, partitioning, and migration paths before any code gets written, because a bad schema will bottleneck your product for years while a bad controller can be rewritten in an afternoon. We use Drizzle or Prisma for most Node.js projects, SQLAlchemy for Python, and raw SQL when the query needs to be tuned by hand. Every project ships with a migration framework and a documented migration policy.
Security is architecture, not a checklist. We implement authentication through Auth0, Clerk, WorkOS, or a self-hosted setup with Passport or Lucia, authorization with policy-based access control using Oso, Cerbos, or a custom OPA deployment, rate limiting at the edge and per user, input validation on every boundary with Zod, Pydantic, or a GraphQL schema, and encryption at rest and in transit by default. For regulated industries we ship SOC 2, HIPAA, and PCI-DSS aligned controls from day one, with documented evidence for auditors.
Observability is not optional. Every production system we build ships with structured logging through Pino, Winston, or Python logging, distributed tracing with OpenTelemetry to Datadog, Honeycomb, or Grafana Tempo, error tracking with Sentry, synthetic checks through Checkly or BetterStack, and SLO-based alerting that wakes someone up only when user-facing performance has actually degraded. When something breaks in production, you get a trace, a log, and a dashboard, not a guess.
We ship backends you can operate. That means CI/CD pipelines that catch regressions before merge, infrastructure-as-code with Terraform or Pulumi, runbooks for common incidents, documented failure modes, seed and reset scripts for local development, and a complete README that a new engineer can follow to a running system in under thirty minutes. You are never locked in, and any competent Node.js, Python, or Go engineer can pick up the codebase and contribute in their first week.
Capabilities
What We Deliver
RESTful API Design & Build
OpenAPI 3.1 specs checked into the repo, consistent error envelopes, cursor or keyset pagination, filtering and sorting conventions, ETag-based caching, rate limiting, and SDK generation in TypeScript, Python, and Swift from the spec so your consumers never drift from the server.
GraphQL APIs & Federation
Schema-first GraphQL with Apollo Server, Pothos, or Mercurius, persisted queries for client security and cache efficiency, DataLoader-based batching to eliminate N+1 queries, Apollo Federation for multi-team schemas, and subscriptions over WebSockets or Server-Sent Events.
tRPC & End-to-End Type Safety
tRPC setups for teams using TypeScript on both client and server, with full end-to-end inference, zero codegen, Zod validation on every input, and a pattern that eliminates an entire class of runtime bugs at compile time.
Microservices & Service Boundaries
Bounded-context service decomposition with clear ownership, async communication through event buses, backwards-compatible contracts, per-service observability, saga or outbox patterns for distributed transactions, and a service catalog so new engineers can find their way around.
Database Design & Query Optimization
Schema modeling with PostgreSQL, MySQL, or specialized stores like ClickHouse and TimescaleDB, indexing strategy informed by actual query patterns, EXPLAIN ANALYZE review on hot paths, partitioning for multi-tenant or high-volume tables, and read-replica routing for expensive analytical queries.
Authentication & Authorization
OAuth 2.0, OIDC, SAML SSO, and magic-link setups through Auth0, Clerk, WorkOS, or self-hosted Lucia, combined with role-based and attribute-based access control using Oso, Cerbos, or Casbin, plus multi-tenant isolation with row-level security in Postgres.
Third-Party API Integration
Stripe, HubSpot, Salesforce, NetSuite, QuickBooks, Shopify, eBay, Amazon SP-API, Twilio, SendGrid, and the long tail of vendor APIs. We build typed clients, exponential backoff with jitter, idempotency keys, dead-letter queues for failed events, and vendor-agnostic adapter patterns so swapping providers is a one-week task, not a rewrite.
Event-Driven Architecture & Message Queues
Pub/sub and work queues through SQS, RabbitMQ, Kafka, NATS, or Redis Streams, with at-least-once delivery semantics, idempotent consumers, the outbox pattern for reliable publishing, and schema registries where the event contracts matter.
Real-Time Systems & WebSockets
Bidirectional real-time over WebSockets with Socket.IO, uWebSockets, or Fastify WebSocket, plus Pusher, Ably, or Supabase Realtime when managed infrastructure fits better, with presence, rooms, and backpressure handling for chat, live collaboration, and live data applications.
Background Jobs & Scheduling
Reliable job processing through BullMQ, Celery, Sidekiq, or Temporal for long-running workflows, with retries, backoff, dead-letter queues, cron scheduling, priority queues, and observability dashboards showing queue depth and processing time per job type.
Multi-Tenant SaaS Backends
Shared-schema with tenant-scoped row-level security, schema-per-tenant isolation for higher-tier customers, per-tenant rate limiting and quotas, tenant-aware caching, and billing integration through Stripe Metered Billing with usage tracking.
API Performance & Scaling
Profiling hot paths with Clinic.js, py-spy, or pprof, Redis caching with proper invalidation, CDN-level caching for public endpoints, horizontal scaling behind load balancers with sticky sessions where needed, and database read replicas for scale-out reads.
Real Results
How We've Helped Businesses Like Yours
A B2B marketplace platform needed to handle 80,000 concurrent users during a weekly high-traffic event. We designed a Node.js Fastify API with horizontal auto-scaling on ECS Fargate, Redis caching for the hot catalog endpoints, cursor pagination throughout, and a separate read-replica fleet for analytics queries, holding P95 latency under 120ms at peak.
A SaaS company needed to integrate with eight different CRMs for their customers without writing a custom integration for each one. We built a normalized contact model, an adapter pattern with a shared interface, and a single webhook layer, reducing the cost of adding a new CRM integration from a three-week project to a three-day project.
A fintech startup required PCI-DSS compliant payment processing with tokenized card storage and a full audit trail. We built an API layer in Go that never touched raw PAN data, tokenized through Stripe, logged every request and response to an append-only store in S3 with object lock, and passed SOC 2 Type II and PCI-DSS Level 1 audits with zero findings.
A healthcare platform needed a HIPAA-compliant API for patient records with field-level encryption, SSO into their provider's EHR, and a full audit log. We built the backend in Python FastAPI on AWS with PHI fields encrypted at application level using AWS KMS, SAML SSO through Okta, and every record access logged to CloudWatch with tamper-evident hashing.
A logistics company needed to replace a fifteen-year-old SOAP integration layer that no one on the team wanted to touch. We built a modern REST API layer in front of the legacy system with caching, request validation, and a deprecation path, letting the team build new features without touching the legacy code for a year while the underlying system was replaced piece by piece.
A media company needed a content API that could serve both their web front-end and mobile apps with different data shapes. We built a GraphQL API with persisted queries, DataLoader batching, and a CDN-level cache for anonymous traffic, cutting their origin load by 85 percent and shipping new content types in hours instead of days.
A developer tools startup needed a public API that external developers could build on. We designed it with OpenAPI 3.1, generated SDKs in TypeScript, Python, Go, and Ruby, published them to npm, PyPI, Go modules, and RubyGems on every release, and built API key management with usage-based billing through Stripe.
An IoT platform needed to ingest two million events per minute from connected devices and surface real-time dashboards. We built the ingestion layer in Go behind an NLB, wrote events to Kafka, processed them in a Flink job to TimescaleDB, and served dashboards over a subscriptions GraphQL API, keeping end-to-end latency under 800ms at the 99th percentile.
A regulated financial platform needed audit-grade event sourcing for every state change. We built an event-sourced backend in TypeScript with EventStoreDB, snapshot projections for read models, strict backwards-compatible event evolution, and a replay harness for disaster recovery, giving their compliance team a defensible audit trail.
A SaaS company needed to break up a three-year-old Rails monolith that was slowing deploys to a crawl. We ran a ports-and-adapters refactor over nine months, extracting billing, notifications, and search into independent services while keeping the core product running, cutting build time from 38 minutes to 7 minutes without a big-bang rewrite.
A real-time collaboration product needed to support fifty users per document with live cursors and CRDT-based merge. We built a WebSocket server in Node.js with Redis pub/sub for fan-out, Yjs for the CRDT layer, and presence state, holding live-cursor latency under 60ms at the P95.
A multi-tenant B2B SaaS needed strict tenant isolation without spinning up a database per customer. We implemented Postgres row-level security with a tenant-id column, per-tenant connection pools for hot customers, per-tenant rate limits, and per-tenant encryption keys managed through AWS KMS, passing a security review with their largest enterprise customer.
Technology
Our Tech Stack
Our Process
How We Work
Discovery & API Contract Design
A one to two week discovery where we map the consumers, document data flows, identify integration points, and produce an API contract in OpenAPI or a GraphQL schema. You review and approve the contract before we write any server code, and it stays the source of truth through the entire engagement.
Data Model & Database Schema
Schema design with normalization, indexing, constraints, and a migration framework, pressure-tested against realistic query patterns. We model read and write paths separately, identify hot queries, and design indexes and partitioning for the actual workload rather than guessing.
Core API Implementation & Type-Safe Clients
Endpoint implementation with input validation through Zod or Pydantic, consistent error handling, structured logging, and automatic client generation from the API contract into TypeScript, Python, and Swift SDKs checked into consumer repos.
Integration, Auth, and Third-Party Wiring
Authentication, authorization, payment processing, email, SMS, CRM, ERP, and any other vendor integrations, built with typed clients, exponential backoff, idempotency keys, and dead-letter queues. Every vendor is wrapped in an adapter so swapping providers is a configuration change.
Testing, Security & Observability Hardening
Unit and integration tests with Vitest, Jest, or pytest, contract tests against the OpenAPI spec, load tests with k6 or Artillery, security review through OWASP ZAP and Snyk, and full observability stack with tracing, logging, and SLO-based alerting wired up before launch.
CI/CD, Deployment & Infrastructure
GitHub Actions or GitLab CI pipelines, infrastructure-as-code in Terraform or Pulumi, zero-downtime deploys behind a load balancer, database migration gating in the pipeline, blue/green or canary rollouts, and one-click rollback.
Handover, Runbooks & Ongoing Support
Complete README, architecture decision records, runbooks for common incidents, recorded code walk-through, and a two to four week post-launch support window. After that you can take it in-house or stay on a monthly retainer for continued development and on-call coverage.
FAQ
Common Questions
Ready to Get Started?
Let's discuss your backend & apis project. We'll review your requirements, answer your questions, and provide a clear proposal — no obligation, no pressure.
Projects starting at $8,000 · 4-30 weeks typical timeline