API Design & Backend Engineering
High-performance REST and GraphQL APIs engineered to be the reliable backbone of your product — secure by design, documented from day one, and built to integrate with anything.
Building APIs That Teams Trust
An API is a contract between your system and everything that consumes it. I design that contract deliberately — starting with domain modelling to ensure the API surface reflects actual business concepts, not database tables. This eliminates the semantic confusion that creates integration bugs months after launch.
I follow an API-first development workflow: the OpenAPI specification is agreed and reviewed before implementation begins. This unlocks parallel frontend and backend development, automated mock servers for consumers, and contract testing that catches breaking changes before they reach production. Documentation is generated from code, so it is always accurate.
Every API I build is instrumented for observability: structured JSON logging, distributed traces with correlation IDs, and latency histograms on every endpoint. When something goes wrong in production — and it will — the data to diagnose it is already there. Not retrofitted after an incident.
<100ms
P99 response latency across production REST API endpoints with proper indexing and caching.
99.99%
Uptime SLA maintained across critical API infrastructure with health checks and auto-recovery.
Core Capabilities
Proven engineering solutions for complex, real-world business problems.
RESTful API Design
OpenAPI 3.0-driven REST APIs with consistent resource naming, HTTP semantics, pagination, filtering, and versioning built in from the start — not bolted on later.
GraphQL & Subscriptions
Schema-first GraphQL APIs with efficient dataloaders, persisted queries, and real-time subscriptions over WebSockets — so clients fetch exactly what they need.
Third-Party Integration
Reliable integration with payment providers, communication platforms, CRMs, and industry-specific APIs — with proper error handling, retries, and idempotency.
Auth & Authorisation
OAuth 2.0, JWT, API keys, and RBAC/ABAC patterns implemented at the middleware layer — so every route is protected and permissions are enforced consistently.
Event-Driven & Queues
Async processing with BullMQ, Redis Streams, or AWS SQS — decoupling services, handling traffic spikes gracefully, and ensuring no work is ever lost.
Documentation & DX
Swagger UI, Postman collections, and integration guides generated from code. Developers integrating your API get a premium experience from their first request.
The Engagement Process
Domain Modelling
Map business concepts to API resources. Agree on naming conventions, authentication flow, and error response formats before writing code.
OpenAPI Specification
Produce the full API contract as an OpenAPI 3.0 spec. Frontend can integrate against mocks while backend implementation begins in parallel.
Implementation & Testing
Build endpoints with full validation, auth middleware, and unit + integration tests. Contract tests run on every PR to catch breaking changes.
Security Review
Penetration test common attack vectors, review authentication flows, validate rate limiting, and confirm OWASP Top 10 mitigations are in place.
Deploy & Instrument
Deploy with structured logging, distributed tracing, latency dashboards, and alerting on error rate and P99 latency thresholds.
Primary Technology Stack
Pricing & Investment
API development cost scales with the number of endpoints, authentication complexity, and integration requirements. Standalone APIs are delivered on a fixed-price basis; ongoing API maintenance is available as a monthly retainer.
Simple REST API
£2,500 – £8,000
CRUD endpoints, JWT authentication, input validation, OpenAPI documentation, and basic rate limiting. Deployed to Vercel or AWS Lambda with automated tests.
Ideal for: Mobile app backends, internal tools, static sites needing dynamic data
Full-Featured API
£8,000 – £22,000
Complex business logic, multi-role permissions, webhooks, third-party integrations, file uploads, caching layer, background jobs, and comprehensive API documentation.
Ideal for: SaaS backends, marketplace platforms, partner APIs requiring versioning
GraphQL / Microservices
£22,000+
GraphQL schema design with subscriptions, federated microservices, event-driven architecture with message queues, service mesh, and distributed tracing.
Ideal for: Large-scale platforms, teams building multiple products on shared infrastructure
All API projects include OpenAPI/Swagger documentation and a Postman collection for your team. Performance benchmarks are run before handover to confirm response times under expected load.
Frequently Asked Questions
Related Services
Web Development
Full-stack Next.js applications powered by your new API.
SaaS Development
Complete SaaS platforms with billing, auth, and multi-tenancy.
Cloud & DevOps
Production infrastructure to run and scale your API reliably.
AI & Automation
AI-powered endpoints and LLM integration into your existing API.
Need a Reliable API Foundation?
Let's design an API architecture your team and your consumers will love to work with — documented, secure, and built to outlast the next five engineering hires.