The Layer Everything Else
Depends On
Users never see your backend, but they feel every weakness in it — slow pages, lost data, features that take months because the schema fights back. We build backends that are fast, well documented and pleasant to extend, which is what keeps your delivery speed up two years from now.
Our Backend & API Services
Services, data and integrations designed for the load you will have, not just the load you have.
REST & GraphQL APIs
Versioned, documented, consistently designed APIs with sensible errors, pagination and auth — the difference between an integration that takes an afternoon and one that takes a fortnight.
Microservices & Modular Monoliths
Service boundaries drawn around genuine domains. We are equally willing to recommend a well-structured monolith, which is the right answer far more often than current fashion suggests.
Database Architecture
Schema design, indexing, query optimisation and migration strategy. Most performance problems we are called in for are database problems wearing a different hat.
Real-Time Systems
WebSockets, event streams and pub/sub for live dashboards, messaging and collaborative features, designed with backpressure and reconnection handled properly.
Third-Party Integration
Payments, logistics, CRM, ERP and messaging providers integrated defensively, with retries, idempotency and graceful degradation when someone else's service has a bad day.
Legacy Modernisation
Incrementally strangling an ageing system rather than attempting a risky rewrite, so the business keeps running while the architecture improves underneath it.
How We Build Backends
Engineering standards we apply regardless of stack.
Documented by Default
OpenAPI or schema documentation generated from the code, so it cannot drift out of date. An undocumented API is an API that will be integrated against incorrectly.
Secure and Validated
Input validation, parameterised queries, rate limiting, sensible auth and secrets handling — the basics, applied consistently rather than remembered occasionally.
Observable in Production
Structured logging, metrics and tracing built in, so diagnosing a production issue is a matter of reading rather than guessing and redeploying.
Tested Where It Counts
Automated coverage on business logic, data integrity and integration boundaries, giving your team the confidence to change things without fear.
What We Are Asked to Build
Typical backend engagements.
Public Product APIs
APIs your customers or partners build against, where documentation and stability are the product.
Platform Backends
The services behind a web or mobile product, including auth, billing and notifications.
Data & Reporting Services
Aggregation and reporting layers that keep analytical load away from your transactional database.
Integration Middleware
A reliable layer between systems that were never designed to work together.
High-Throughput Processing
Queue-backed pipelines handling volume spikes without dropping work.
Legacy Rescue
Stabilising and incrementally replacing a system nobody wants to touch.
Why Our Backends Age Well
Boring Technology, Deliberately
We favour well-understood, well-supported tools over novelty. Your backend needs to be maintainable by whoever inherits it, possibly years after we have finished.
Right-Sized Architecture
We build for a realistic view of your growth rather than hypothetical hyperscale. Premature distribution is one of the most expensive mistakes in software.
Your Team Can Extend It
Conventional structure, meaningful names, documented decisions. Onboarding a new engineer should take days, not months.
Our Backend Stack
Languages
- Node.js / TypeScript
- Python
- Go
- PHP
- Java
- C#
Frameworks
- NestJS
- Express
- FastAPI
- Django
- Laravel
- Spring Boot
Data
- PostgreSQL
- MySQL
- MongoDB
- Redis
- Elasticsearch
- ClickHouse
Messaging
- RabbitMQ
- Kafka
- SQS
- WebSockets
- gRPC
- Event sourcing
Backend & API Development — Common Questions
REST remains the pragmatic default for most APIs — simpler to cache, easier to debug, universally understood. GraphQL earns its added complexity when you have many varied clients needing different shapes of the same data, or deeply nested relationships that would otherwise mean many round trips. We are happy to build either and sometimes both.
Usually not at first. Microservices solve organisational scaling problems — many teams needing to deploy independently — at the cost of significant operational complexity. For a single team, a well-structured modular monolith is faster to build, easier to operate and can be split later once the boundaries have proven themselves.
Yes, and much of our work is exactly that: extending, stabilising or modernising a system already in production. We start with an audit of architecture, dependencies, test coverage and performance so you get an informed view before committing to any direction.
Versioned, reversible migrations run through the deployment pipeline, with backward-compatible changes staged so old and new application versions can run side by side during a rollout. For large tables we use online migration techniques to avoid locking, and we always rehearse against a production-sized copy first.
We version from the first public release, because retrofitting versioning onto consumers already in production is painful. Additive changes go into the current version; breaking changes get a new one with a documented deprecation window so integrators have a defined runway.
By measuring before optimising. We profile to find the actual bottleneck, which is very often a missing index, an N+1 query or a synchronous call that should be queued — rather than the thing everyone assumed. Load testing against realistic data volumes then confirms the fix under pressure.
Other Services We Offer
Web Development
Fast, accessible, search-friendly websites and web applications built to convert.
AI & ML Solutions
Predictive models, computer vision and NLP — plus a full family of generative AI services.
Mobile App Development
iOS and Android apps that feel native, work offline and survive store review.
Cloud & DevOps
Infrastructure that scales predictably, deploys safely and costs what it should.
Build on a foundation that holds
Whether it is a new platform or a system that has stopped scaling, tell us the situation and we will assess it properly.