Backend, APIs & Databases

Backend work is the part of the product nobody notices until it breaks: a schema that starts timing out under real load, an API with no versioning strategy, a monolith that can't scale past a single Postgres instance. We build and rebuild that layer — REST, GraphQL, and gRPC APIs with proper auth and rate limiting, schemas indexed and sharded for the query patterns you actually run, and event-driven services on Kafka or RabbitMQ that scale horizontally instead of falling over under load. The language and database fit the workload, not the other way around: Node.js and Go for high-throughput services, Python and Java where your team or ecosystem already lives, PostgreSQL and MySQL as relational defaults, and MongoDB, DynamoDB, or Cassandra when the data genuinely doesn't fit a table.

This is for teams past the MVP stage: a startup whose Node.js backend is buckling under real traffic, a product team that inherited a MySQL database nobody wants to touch, or an engineering lead who needs realtime notifications or live data — WebSockets, edge functions — added without rewriting the whole stack. It's also for consolidations and migrations, where the cost of getting it wrong is downtime or lost data, not just a missed deadline. When the bottleneck isn't the primary database at all, we add Elasticsearch or ClickHouse alongside it for search and analytics, or a Redis caching layer in front of it, rather than forcing every problem through the same relational hammer.

Our approach is disciplined because the stakes are: we design schemas and API contracts before writing a line of service code, we run migrations with verification steps and a clean rollback path so they ship with no data loss, and we build on a stack — Node.js, Go, Python, Java, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Redis, Kafka, gRPC, Elasticsearch, ClickHouse — chosen for what actually holds up in production, not what's trendy. Focused engagements, like an API build or a query-tuning pass, start at $8,000; full backend platforms and migrations start at $25,000+, scoped against your real system rather than a generic estimate.