NORTHELL
SYSTEMS OPERATIONAL Start a project →
BACK END DEVELOPMENT SERVICES

Back-End Development Services for Systems That Handle Real Load

We design APIs and databases against your real data volume and access patterns, not a demo dataset. Observability — logging, monitoring, alerting — ships with the system, not after the first incident.

Talk to an engineer

BONUS Free: API Design Review Checklist — 24 checks covering versioning, auth, rate limiting, and error handling — run it against your API spec before you build against it.

We reply within one business day. No spam, no obligation.

In short: Northell's back-end development covers API design, database architecture, and infrastructure built to hold up under real production load and scale.
CAPABILITIES

What Back-End Development Covers

API Design & Development

REST or GraphQL APIs designed for the clients that will actually consume them, versioned from day one.

Database Architecture

Schema and query design built against your real data volume and access patterns, with migration paths planned in.

Authentication & Authorization

Role-based access control and auth flows (including SSO/SAML where needed) built to your actual permission model.

Observability & Reliability

Logging, error tracking, and alerting wired in before launch — not discovered as a gap during an incident.

FIT CHECK

Built for Specific Buyers, Not Everyone

CTOs Scaling Past a Prototype

The MVP's back end worked for 100 users and is starting to buckle at 10,000.

Teams Fixing a Slow API

Know queries are slow and need someone to actually profile and fix them, not guess.

Product Teams Needing a Real Data Model

Have a front end ready and need a back end designed around real, not placeholder, data.

If the actual problem is front-end perceived performance, not the API, we'll say so during scoping rather than rebuilding the wrong layer.

PROCESS

From Kickoff to Launch

01

Architecture & Load Review

We map data volume, access patterns, and your realistic 12-month growth before choosing an architecture.

→ Architecture plan + database schema
02

API & Schema Build

APIs and schemas built and tested against realistic data volumes, not a handful of seed rows.

→ Tested API + migrated schema
03

Integration & Load Testing

Load-tested against your realistic peak traffic before launch, not extrapolated from a guess.

→ Load-test report + tuned system
04

Observability & Handoff

Monitoring, alerting, and documentation handed to your team with a real runbook, not a wiki stub.

→ Monitored system + runbook
STACK

Technologies We Use

Languages
Node.jsPythonGo
Databases
PostgreSQLRedisMongoDB
Infra
AWSDockerKubernetes
Observability
DatadogSentryGrafana
TODO back-end systems shipped — not yet tracked separately
TODO average API latency improvement on migrations
TODO average build timeline
FAQ

Common Questions About Back-End Development

What does back-end development actually include?

API design, database schema and query design, authentication/authorization, background job processing, and the infrastructure it all runs on — scoped to what your product actually needs, not a default checklist.

Can you take over an existing back-end codebase?

Yes — we start with an architecture and query-performance audit to understand what's actually there before committing to new work or a timeline.

How do you handle scaling?

We design against your realistic 12-month load projection, not today's traffic or an arbitrary 'web scale' assumption — over-engineering costs as much as under-engineering.

Which databases and languages do you use?

PostgreSQL is our default for relational data; we also work in Node.js, Python, and Go depending on what fits the team taking over maintenance.

Is monitoring included?

Yes — logging, error tracking, and uptime/performance monitoring are part of the build, not a separate line item discovered after an incident.

Start Your Back-End Development Project