API design and development
REST and GraphQL APIs with clear contracts, versioning, and documentation your frontend and partner teams can build against without guesswork.
005Backend Development
Backend development that holds up under real traffic
We design and build the server side of your product: APIs, databases, background jobs, and the infrastructure that runs them. For CTOs and founders who need senior backend engineers, either to build a system from scratch or to reinforce a team that is already shipping.
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What we build
What backend work with Webisoft covers
Every engagement is scoped to your product, but the work usually falls into these areas.
Data modeling and databases
Schema design, migrations, and query tuning across PostgreSQL, MySQL, and document stores. We pick storage for your access patterns, not for fashion.
Integrations and third-party services
Payments, auth providers, CRMs, messaging, and internal systems, wired together with retries, idempotency, and failure handling built in from the start.
Background processing and queues
Job queues, schedulers, and event pipelines for the work that should not block a request: billing runs, imports, notifications, and long computations.
Performance and reliability
Profiling, caching, load testing, and observability so you know how the system behaves before your users find out. We fix the slow paths, not just the symptoms.
Security and access control
Authentication, authorization, secrets management, and input validation applied as engineering defaults, plus reviews of the code paths that touch sensitive data.
How we work
From architecture review to production
(4)- 1
Audit and architecture
We read your codebase, map the current architecture, and agree on what to build, refactor, or leave alone. You get a written plan before anyone writes code.
- 2
Build in short cycles
Work ships in small, reviewed increments behind your existing branch and CI process. You see progress in the repository every week, not in status decks.
- 3
Test and harden
Automated tests, load checks, and staging runs against realistic data before anything reaches production. Rollback paths are part of the deliverable.
- 4
Deploy and hand over
We ship to production with monitoring in place, then document the system and walk your team through it so ownership transfers cleanly.
Why Webisoft
Why teams hand us their backend
Webisoft is a Montreal software studio staffed by senior engineers who have carried systems from first commit to production and kept them running after.
Senior engineers only
The people who scope your project are the people who build it. No bait and switch to a junior bench after the contract is signed.
We work in your stack
Python, Node.js, Go, and the frameworks around them. We adapt to your conventions and tooling instead of forcing a rewrite into ours.
Production is the standard
Code review, tests, observability, and deployment discipline are part of every engagement, not billable extras. We build what we would want to be on call for.
Flexible engagement
Take a full project team or embed one or two backend engineers inside your own squad. Scale the engagement up or down as the roadmap changes.
FAQ
Backend development questions
(4)- Python, Node.js with TypeScript, Go, and Java cover most modern backend work, with PostgreSQL as the most common relational database. The right choice depends on the workload: Python suits data-heavy and AI-adjacent services, Node.js and TypeScript suit teams sharing code with a JavaScript frontend, and Go suits high-concurrency network services. Team familiarity matters as much as the technology itself, since an unfamiliar stack is learned on the project's budget.
- The standard approach starts with an audit to understand the architecture, test coverage, and risk areas, followed by an agreed plan that keeps the product running while improvements land incrementally. Big-bang rewrites are rarely justified; most legacy systems are better improved module by module behind stable interfaces. A takeover goes fastest when documentation, deployment scripts, and at least one knowledgeable engineer are available during handover.
- Usually the baseline does: a backend is not done until it has a deployment pipeline, separated environments, and monitoring, typically on AWS, GCP, or Azure. Deeper platform work such as multi-region architecture, Kubernetes operations, or cost optimization is often scoped separately or handled alongside a dedicated infrastructure team. The dividing line is whatever the service needs to run reliably versus broader platform engineering.
- Standard practice combines NDAs, the client's own access controls with least-privilege credentials, and development against anonymized or synthetic data wherever production data is not strictly required. Secrets stay in a managed vault rather than in code, and sensitive code paths such as authentication and payments get an explicit security review before release. Access is revoked at the end of the engagement, and audit logs record who touched what.
Where we add value
Backend systems built for the second year, not just the demo
Backends fail in ways demos never show: under load, during migrations, and when the third integration meets the first two. We engineer for those moments, with architecture decisions documented and trade-offs made explicit before they become expensive.
API design and contracts
We design REST or GraphQL APIs as contracts first, documented with OpenAPI so frontend, mobile, and partner teams can build in parallel. Versioning, pagination, idempotency, and error semantics are decided up front, because retrofitting them onto a live API is where most integration pain comes from.Data modeling and databases
Schema design gets more of our attention than any framework choice, because data outlives code. We work mainly with PostgreSQL, adding Redis for caching and queues, and reach for specialized stores only when access patterns demand it. Migrations are scripted, reversible, and tested against production-sized data.Scaling and performance engineering
We profile before we optimize, then fix the actual bottleneck: query plans, N+1 access patterns, missing indexes, or synchronous work that belongs in a queue. Horizontal scaling is designed in through stateless services and background workers, so growth means adding instances rather than rewriting.Security and compliance groundwork
Authentication with OAuth 2.0 or OpenID Connect, role based access control, encryption at rest and in transit, audit logs, and dependency scanning are standard in our builds. For clients facing SOC 2, GDPR, or Quebec's Law 25, we build the technical controls so the audit is paperwork rather than re-engineering.Integrations and event-driven work
Payment providers, CRMs, ERPs, and webhooks are where backends meet the messy outside world. We wrap third party services behind our own interfaces, handle retries and partial failures explicitly, and use message queues where reliability matters more than immediacy. When a provider has an outage, your core system degrades gracefully instead of falling over.Observability and operations
Every backend ships with structured logging, metrics, tracing, and alerting, using tools like Sentry, Prometheus, or your cloud provider's stack. Deployments are automated through CI/CD with rollback paths. The measure of success is that when something breaks at 2 a.m., the on-call person can see what, where, and why in minutes.
Our approach
How a backend engagement runs
(4)- 1
Requirements and architecture
We start by mapping the domain: entities, workflows, expected load, compliance constraints, and every system we must integrate with. Output is an architecture document covering service boundaries, data model, API surface, and infrastructure, with the trade-offs written down. You approve the design before significant code exists. - 2
Foundation and walking skeleton
The first build milestone is a thin end to end slice: one real workflow through the API, database, auth, CI/CD, and deployed environments. This proves the architecture with running code and gives every later feature a paved path, which is far cheaper than discovering infrastructure gaps in month three. - 3
Feature delivery in tested increments
Features ship in short cycles, each with unit and integration tests, migration scripts, and updated API docs. We demo against a staging environment that mirrors production, and load test the endpoints that will take real traffic. Scope changes are handled through the backlog with visible cost, not silent schedule slip. - 4
Launch, monitoring, and evolution
Go-live includes monitoring dashboards, alert routing, runbooks, and a rollback plan we have actually rehearsed. After launch we watch real traffic, tune based on production data, and hand over with documentation and walkthroughs. Many clients keep us for ongoing evolution; others take over with their internal team, which the documentation is written to support.
FAQ
Questions buyers ask about backend work
(6)- The main cost drivers are the number of distinct workflows, the count and quality of third party integrations, compliance requirements, and how much existing data must be migrated. Integrations deserve special mention: a payment provider with clean documentation might take days, while a legacy ERP with an undocumented SOAP API can take weeks. We scope these individually rather than averaging them, so the estimate reflects your actual system, and a typical product backend runs eight to sixteen weeks.
- For most products under heavy iteration, a well structured monolith is faster to build, cheaper to run, and easier to debug, and that is usually our recommendation at the start. Microservices earn their operational overhead when you have multiple teams shipping independently or components with genuinely different scaling profiles. We design monoliths with clear internal boundaries, so extracting a service later is a planned refactor rather than a crisis, and you pay the complexity cost only when the organization actually needs it.
- Security controls are built in from the first commit: hardened authentication, least privilege access, encrypted data, secrets management, and automated dependency scanning in CI. For regulated clients we map requirements from frameworks like SOC 2, GDPR, PIPEDA, or Law 25 into concrete technical tasks, including audit logging and data retention and deletion flows. We also set up the evidence trail auditors ask for, so certification later does not require rebuilding. If you need penetration testing, we coordinate with the testing firm and remediate findings.
- Yes, and we prefer it: everything is built in your AWS, GCP, or Azure accounts under your billing and ownership. We define infrastructure as code with tools like Terraform, so environments are reproducible and reviewable rather than hand configured. If you have existing DevOps standards, VPC layouts, or an internal platform team, we work within those constraints and document anything we add.
- We avoid big-bang replacements. The usual pattern is to put a stable API layer in front of the legacy system, then move capabilities behind that layer one at a time while both systems run, often called the strangler approach. Data synchronization between old and new is designed explicitly, since that is where these migrations fail. Your product keeps operating throughout, and each migrated piece reduces risk instead of accumulating it toward one dangerous cutover date.
- You get a named lead engineer, a shared board with the backlog, short written progress updates, and a demo at each cycle. Communication runs through Slack or Teams with your team, not through account managers. Starting is a scoping conversation followed by a fixed price architecture phase for larger builds, so you see the design and a grounded estimate before committing to the full budget. Smaller and well defined projects can skip straight to a quoted build.
