E-commerce platform
Agento Wear
A production storefront built from nothing: catalogue, guest checkout, payments, order processing, automated email and an admin dashboard the owner runs without an engineer on call.
- Next.js
- React
- Supabase
- Payments
Bench · Backend engineers
Hire senior backend engineers
Service and API engineers who have carried a pager, and who write the boring, well-tested code that keeps you off one.
$28 – $45 / hr · from $4,500 / month
You are probably here because of one of these.
If more than one is true, the problem is usually capacity rather than skill — and that is a different conversation.
- Feature work has stalled behind a service nobody wants to touch.
- P95 latency has been creeping up for two quarters.
- Your API contract lives in three places and agrees in none of them.
- One engineer holds the whole system in their head and is about to take leave.
Capabilities
What these engineers actually do.
Written as work, not as keywords. If your problem is not on this list, say so on the call — we will tell you honestly whether it is ours.
API design and delivery
REST, GraphQL and gRPC services with versioning, pagination, idempotency and errors that a client engineer can act on without asking you.
Distributed systems
Queues, workers, event streams, sagas and the retry semantics that stop a partial failure from becoming a data incident.
Database and query work
Schema design, migrations that run against live traffic, index and query tuning, and the sharding conversation you have been avoiding.
Performance
Profiling first, then targeted work. We report a before and after number, never a vague 'optimisation pass'.
Legacy rescue
Characterisation tests around code nobody understands, then incremental strangling. No rewrite proposals in month one.
Integrations
Payments, billing, identity, CRM and the third-party APIs that generate most of your production surprises.
Stack
The tools our bench works in daily.
We work inside what you already have. Nothing on this list is a recommendation to migrate.
Languages
- Python
- Go
- TypeScript / Node
- Java
- Rust
- SQL
Frameworks
- FastAPI
- Django
- NestJS
- Express
- Spring Boot
- gRPC
Data stores
- PostgreSQL
- MySQL
- Redis
- MongoDB
- DynamoDB
- Elasticsearch
Messaging
- Kafka
- RabbitMQ
- SQS
- Celery
- Temporal
- NATS
Rates
Published, so you can compare before you call.
Full-time, one engineer, includes code review by a senior lead.
| Role | Seniority | Rate |
|---|---|---|
| Backend Engineer | Mid-senior · 3–5 yrs | $28 – $36 / hr |
| Senior Backend Engineer | Senior · 5–8 yrs | $36 – $45 / hr |
| Staff / Lead Engineer | Lead · 8+ yrs | $48 – $62 / hr |
| Full-stack Engineer | Senior · 5+ yrs | $32 – $42 / hr |
Rates are per hour for full-time engagement and include our management, review and replacement guarantee. Part-time and pod pricing differ — see services.
Working to a fixed budget, or need part-time, long-term or several engineers? Those price below the card.
Contact for pricingThe 2026 rate card and a sample contract
Every role, every rate, our standard MSA and NDA, and the two-week trial terms. No call required to read it.
Week one
What happens in the first five days.
No two-week onboarding. The first week produces something you can read.
- Runs your service locally and documents everything that was undocumented.
- Picks up a small, real ticket rather than a synthetic warm-up task.
- Opens a pull request against your main branch, reviewed by your team.
- Writes down the three riskiest things they found.
Measured
Numbers from delivered work.
P95 1.8s → 240ms
Checkout API latency after a targeted query and cache pass
Zero
Rollbacks across 340 deploys on a client platform in 2025
11 days
Median time from contract signed to first merged PR
Hiring path
How you get one of these engineers.
The same five steps regardless of discipline.
- 01Day 0
A 30-minute call
You describe the gap. We tell you which discipline it actually is — that answer changes about a third of the time — and whether we have the person.
- 02Within 5 days
Two or three profiles
Real engineers with availability, not a database dump. Each one comes with a written note on why they fit and where they would struggle.
- 03Days 5–9
You interview them
Your process, your bar, your rejection. We do not present anyone we would not hire ourselves, and the engineer who interviews is the engineer who ships.
- 04Days 10–24
Two-week paid trial
They join your standups and open real pull requests. Stop inside the trial for any reason and the engagement ends there.
- 05Ongoing
Embedded, and reviewed
Monthly rolling from there. A senior lead reviews their work independently of you, and we tell you before you have to ask.
Related work
Something we shipped with this stack.
Questions about hiring backend engineers.
Will they follow our conventions or impose their own?
Yours. Engineers spend their first days reading your codebase and matching its idiom. Suggestions for change arrive as a written note in month two, not as a surprise refactor in week one.
Can they be on-call?
Yes, within their working window, and on a rotation you define. Our overlap covers US business hours; genuine 24/7 coverage needs a pod, which we can staff.
Do you do frontend too?
Our full-stack engineers ship React and Next.js alongside the API. If you need a dedicated frontend or design engineer, say so on the call — we staff those as well.
Need a different discipline?
Most teams start with one engineer and add a second from a neighbouring bench within two quarters.
AI/ML engineers
Engineers who have taken an LLM feature past the demo — through evaluation, latency, cost and the failure modes that only appear with real users.
$34 – $52 / hrSee the bench
Data engineers
Pipeline and warehouse engineers who care whether the number in the dashboard is correct, and can prove it.
$30 – $47 / hrSee the bench
Cloud & DevOps engineers
Infrastructure engineers who reduce the number of things that can page you, and who treat your cloud bill as an engineering artefact.
$29 – $46 / hrSee the bench
Tell us about the backend engineer role.
Thirty minutes, an engineer on the call, and two or three real profiles within five working days.