For systems that have to survive the failure nobody planned for
Hire Backend Developers
Backend systems fail quietly under conditions nobody tested for, which is why the actual skill is designing for the failure you have not seen yet. These engineers are matched to that discipline, evaluated on the work above, and onboarded inside the process your team already runs.
- Profiles typically within two business days
- Replacement Assurance: If an engineer is not the right fit, a replacement from our own team starts within ten business days of your request, at no extra cost
- You interview before placement if you want to
- At least four hours a day inside your core working hours. Two hours plus a daily written handover for the US West Coast
- 14-Day Risk-Free Trial: For your first engineer on a time-and-materials engagement. Up to 14 calendar days or 80 logged working hours, whichever comes first. End within the trial and pay nothing for trial hours. Continue beyond it and those hours are billed at the agreed rate. Unpaid trial work remains ours if you stop
How we evaluate a backend engineer
The tasks, the signals and the onboarding, walked through by the people who run them.
90 secSample frame · video pending01Published, not promised
The assessment behind every engineer we send.
The backend assessment is open for inspection: five competencies built around failure design and operability, with weak answers documented as clearly as strong ones.
What we listen forWhether the schema anticipates the business, not just the first feature.
Design a schema for an order system that must support partial refunds added later. Walk us through what you would model now to avoid a painful migration then.
- What strong sounds like
- Anticipates the refund case structurally without over-engineering for every possible future feature, showing calibrated judgement.
- What gives us pause
- Either ignores the future requirement entirely or builds excessive flexibility for cases that may never occur.
Node.js · Python · Java · Go
PostgreSQL · MongoDB · Redis
Kafka · RabbitMQ · SQS
Docker · Kubernetes · Prometheus
02Who you actually meet
The bench, priced by seniority.
Three seniority tiers, priced honestly, and the engineers who fill each one today. Real names and photos take their place as soon as we can share them, and the standard stays exactly the same.
Engineer
Features scoped tightly enough to ship inside your review bar, every time.
The right first hire when your seniors already set the standard.
$2,400–3,100per month
Senior
The hard module nobody else wants to own, taken end to end.
Ownership of a surface, without adding a manager to your headcount.
$3,400–4,300per month
Lead
The workstream's decisions, made daily, so nothing waits on a meeting.
One accountable voice for a pod or initiative that can't afford to drift.
$4,600–5,800per month
Backend engineer
4 yrs · US East overlap
Owns three services' observability; wrote the runbooks on-call actually uses
- Node.js
- Redis
- Prometheus
- Docker
Senior backend engineer
8 yrs · UK + EU hours
Redesigned a payment flow around idempotency; provider timeouts stopped losing transactions
- Go
- PostgreSQL
- Kafka
- Kubernetes
Lead backend engineer
11 yrs · EU + US split
Drew the service boundaries that let three teams stop blocking each other
- Java
- gRPC
- AWS
- Terraform
Indicative ranges, representative profiles. Exact figures and named engineers arrive with your shortlist.
Weighing this against a freelancer, a direct hire or a marketplace? See the honest comparison
03From stated problem to first change
Four steps, each closing on evidence.
Brief, shortlist, watched assessment, first merged service change: four steps, each auditable, none binding until you choose the next.
Define the reliability problem
We map what the system actually needs to survive under real failure conditions. The role brief describes the problem to solve, not a stack of technologies to know.
A brief your leads signMatch against your stack
Candidates are screened against your data layer, your messaging patterns and your review culture. Three engineers who fit beat thirty who list the right languages.
Three fits, not thirty CVsAssess on the real tasks
The competencies above are worked through with your engineers present if you want. You see judgement about failure conditions, not a rehearsed system design monologue.
Evaluation you can watchOnboard inside your process
Access, standards and a first bounded change to a real service. Continuity cover means a departure is our problem to solve before it becomes yours.
A merged change in week one
04Evidence and proof
Engineers who designed for the failure before it happened.
Backend proof is systems that survive the failure nobody planned for and incidents that get diagnosed fast. Every record here waits for written client approval before production.
Explore case studies
A payment flow that survives a flaky third-party API without losing a transaction.
Orra Systems occasionally lost transaction state when a payment provider timed out mid-call. An embedded backend engineer redesigned the flow around explicit idempotency, and the failure mode disappeared.
- Lost transactions on provider timeout
- Eliminated
- Time to redesign and ship
- Two weeks
The partial-failure question in the interview described almost exactly the incident that had cost us a bad week two months earlier.
Sample · pending client approval
He asked what our on-call engineer would need to see during an incident before he had written a line of the actual service.
Sample · pending client approval
05Three shapes, one standard
Add an engineer, a backend pod, or a practice.
A single engineer inside your on-call reality, a backend pod owning services outright, or the product practice for full delivery. The map above routes by the actual need.
- Team extension
One named engineer
A single backend specialist inside your direction and your reviews. The smallest commitment and the most common starting point.
- Delivery pods
A backend pod
Engineers and a lead who own the service layer end to end. You set priorities and acceptance while the pod carries delivery.
- Product engineering
The practice, not the person
When the work is a product build rather than a role to fill, product engineering carries delivery accountability instead.
06Straight answers
Asked before a backend hire is signed.
01What does a backend engineer actually do day to day?
Designs data models, service reliability and security boundaries, diagnoses performance issues under real production conditions, and builds monitoring for the people who will get paged. The unglamorous majority of the work is the failure modes that only appear under real load.
02Do you hire for a specific language or stack?
Matched to your actual stack. The evaluation focuses on reliability and data modelling judgement, which transfers across languages, then confirms hands-on familiarity with whichever your codebase runs.
03Can we run our own interviews as well?
Yes. Stack your own system-design rounds on ours, or reuse the published partial-failure exercise directly; it is written to be borrowed.
04How fast can a backend engineer start?
Shortlists in days from a continuously assessed bench. Start speed then follows your access provisioning more than anything else.
05Who manages the engineer day to day?
The engineer works your process: your standups, your reviews, your standards. We carry the employment risk and the replacement promise.
06What if the engineer is not the right fit?
Flag misfit early; the replacement is our cost and the re-match is precise, which is why it rarely needs a third attempt.
07Do your backend developers code with AI assistance?
Yes, without pretending otherwise. AI accelerates handlers, fixtures and test scaffolding; the engineer keeps ownership of failure design, data modelling and operability. When a service pages someone at night, the person who merged it answers for it.
08How does pricing work for a hired backend engineer?
Tier bands above set the range, the shortlist fixes the figure, billing is monthly per named engineer with only a notice period as exit terms.