Backend & API Development for Reliability at Scale
This is the core of what I do. I've led a 4-person backend team within an 11-person cross-functional org at a growth-stage startup — payment systems, real-time services, and cloud infrastructure that had to keep working while transaction volume grew. Remote-friendly, based in Mumbai, working with clients across India and beyond.
What I build
- APIs and services — REST APIs designed around how they'll actually be consumed, with validation, authentication, and permissions handled properly rather than patched in later.
- Payment and billing integrations — including Stripe and CASS in transaction-heavy flows, built with data integrity and fault tolerance as requirements.
- Real-time systems — WebSocket-based communication where polling has stopped being good enough.
- Cloud infrastructure and DevOps — CI/CD pipelines, Docker, Terraform, and serverless architecture on AWS Lambda and API Gateway.
- Database and query performance work — partitioning, indexing, and access-pattern rework when queries have become the bottleneck.
- Automated workflow systems — including review-before-ship approval flows where changes are too consequential to go live unchecked.
Who this is for
- Products where the backend has become the constraint — slow queries, brittle deploys, or a system that groans when volume rises.
- Teams that need senior backend capacity without a full-time hire, and want someone who can make architecture decisions rather than only execute tickets.
- Founders with a frontend but no system underneath it — a prototype or no-code build that now needs a real backend.
If you need the interface built too, web application development covers both halves. If the front-end of an API-driven site isn't being crawled or indexed properly, that's a technical SEO problem as much as a backend one.
Related work
Three real projects, described in as much detail as NDA allows:
AWS & CI/CD Infrastructure
Full CI/CD automation and a move to serverless — 90% less deployment effort and 60% faster API response times.
AWS Lambda · Docker · Terraform Read the case study →Pricing Engine & Payment Integration
An automated volume-based pricing engine with a maker-checker review workflow, plus Stripe and CASS integration.
Node.js · NestJS · Stripe · AWS Lambda Read the case study →Real-Time WebSocket Application
Replaced client-side polling with WebSocket communication, removing redundant API calls and visible lag.
Node.js · WebSockets · MySQL Read the case study →Common questions
Usually yes, and usually that's the right call. Rewrites are expensive and risky. I'll ask for read access to the codebase first so the scope is based on what's actually there rather than on assumptions.
Yes. I've integrated Stripe and CASS into transaction-heavy flows on a production fintech platform, with data integrity and fault tolerance built in rather than bolted on afterwards.
That's the approach I've used in production: run the old and new paths in parallel, monitor closely under real traffic, and cut over only once the new path matches the old one's behaviour. It's slower than a hard switch, and considerably less likely to page you at midnight.
Yes — CI/CD pipelines, containerisation, infrastructure as code, and serverless architecture on AWS are all part of what I do, and are described in the AWS and CI/CD case study.
Yes, fully — source, credentials, and infrastructure configuration. No lock-in, ever.
Backend work, an API, a payment integration, or infrastructure that needs sorting out? Tell me what's breaking and I'll tell you what it'd take to fix.