Service
The backend your app or website doesn't have to think about.
APIs, databases and infrastructure engineered to stay fast and secure as your product grows — built as a foundation for whatever you're building next, not a one-off script that only works for the first thousand users.
The backend is the part of a product nobody sees and everybody depends on. It's also where most of the expensive mistakes get made — a database schema that made sense at launch and falls over at scale, an API with no rate limiting that goes down under its own traffic, authentication that was never actually reviewed for security before it shipped. We build backend systems the way we'd want to hand one over: documented, monitored, and designed around the load and the failure modes your product will actually see, not just the ones that showed up in testing. This is as much engineering discipline as it is code — decisions made early tend to be the ones a product is still living with years later.
APIs designed to be used by more than one thing
Your backend is rarely serving just one client for long — a mobile app today often means a web dashboard or a partner integration tomorrow. We design APIs as a proper contract from the start: consistent, versioned, and documented well enough that your own team, or ours, can build against it months later without reverse-engineering what a particular endpoint actually does. Whether that's a REST API or GraphQL depends on how your data is shaped and how your clients need to query it — we'll recommend whichever one actually fits, not whichever is more fashionable at the time. We document every API with OpenAPI/Swagger as we build it, not as an afterthought once someone finally asks for it, so integrating against your backend never depends on remembering how a particular endpoint behaves.
Data architecture that holds up under real load
A database schema is one of the most expensive things to change after launch, so we spend real time on it before launch. That means choosing the right database for the job — relational, document, or a mix of both — and designing indexes, relationships and caching around how your application actually queries data, not just how it's convenient to store it. We build in monitoring from day one, so performance problems surface as a graph trending in the wrong direction, not as a support ticket from a frustrated user weeks later.
Security treated as a requirement, not a checklist
Authentication, authorisation and data protection get engineered in from the start rather than reviewed once, late, right before launch. That covers the fundamentals — properly hashed credentials, scoped access tokens, rate limiting, input validation against injection — as well as the parts that are specific to your business: making sure a user can only ever see the data they're supposed to, and that a single compromised API key can't quietly become a compromised database.
Infrastructure that scales without a rebuild
We deploy backends on cloud infrastructure sized for where your product is now, with a clear, already-understood path for scaling it as usage grows — rather than over-engineering for traffic you may never see, or under-building something that needs a rewrite the moment it succeeds. Automated deployments, monitoring and alerting mean issues get caught by a system, not by a customer noticing something's broken first and telling you about it on social media.
When the backend is the bottleneck, not a new feature
Not every backend engagement starts with a new app. Just as often, we're brought in because an existing product's backend has become the thing slowing everything else down — a legacy system nobody fully understands anymore, a database that can't be changed without breaking something else, infrastructure costs that have crept up without a clear reason why. In those cases we start with an audit rather than a rebuild: understanding what's actually there, what's safe to change, and what the real bottleneck is before recommending anything. Sometimes that's a full replacement; often it's a smaller, more targeted fix than the business expected, because the perceived problem and the actual problem aren't always the same thing.
What's included
- REST or GraphQL API design and development
- Database architecture, indexing and performance tuning
- Authentication, authorisation and security best practice
- Cloud infrastructure setup, deployment automation and monitoring
- Documentation your team can actually build against
Building something that needs a real backend?
Whether it's powering a new app or replacing infrastructure that's outgrown itself, we'll scope a backend built for where your product is actually headed.