Hire a Back-End Developer for APIs, Databases, and Jobs

Back-end problems are quiet until they are expensive. A report stops matching, a job stalls overnight, or a migration goes wrong in production.

I am a freelance back-end developer in Fort Worth, Texas. I build APIs, design databases, run background jobs, and host them on AWS. You talk to me directly, and I write the code.

What I build on the back end

REST APIs in Node and Express, Django, and Go.
SQL databases in PostgreSQL and MySQL, including the schema changes that are hard to get right.
Background jobs and workers that claim work safely and recover when a worker dies.
AWS infrastructure with EC2, S3, and VPC, in Docker behind Nginx.
Monitoring with Prometheus and Grafana, so problems show up before customers report them.

Proof you can check

Three production back ends, in three languages.

Project	Stack	What it shows	By the numbers
RE/AMP	Node, Express, PostgreSQL, Valkey, AWS	A multi-tenant API with workers, Stripe webhooks, and Twilio messaging	726 passing tests across 42 suites at one staging checkpoint
Distributed crawler	Python, Playwright, Docker	Worker replicas that claim rows with `SKIP LOCKED`, and a recovery loop for stalled jobs	Stalled after 10 minutes; alert after 3 failures
Inventory ad feed pipeline	Go, MySQL	An ETL service and API that feeds Google and Facebook ads	Still used for inventory marketing

Crawler batch sizes and timeouts are from memory of how the system ran. Three notes go deeper: rebuilding staging from production backups, private S3 storage with pre-signed URLs, and fixing Prometheus high-cardinality metrics.

Database work

Most of the risk in a back end lives in the database. On RE/AMP, data is queried with raw SQL through node-postgres, and Prisma Migrate manages schema changes.

Two changes stand out. One added a company ID to everything, which is the multi-tenant change itself. The other moved each property from one workflow to several running at once.

For both, I wrote migration scripts, tested them repeatedly, ran dry runs on staging, and then tested on staging with live data before production. Both went through without a problem. The tenant rule is written up in multi-tenant data boundaries in PostgreSQL.

How to evaluate a back-end developer

What happens when a job dies halfway?

Workers crash. Ask how claimed work gets back in the queue, and when the system stops retrying and asks for a person. My answer is in how I recover stale crawler jobs.

How do they change a schema in production?

Listen for migration scripts, dry runs, and a test against real data before production. “We just run the migration” is how outages start.

Where do permissions come from?

The server should take identity from the signed-in user, not from the request body. Ask how they test that one customer cannot read another’s data.

How would you know something is wrong?

Ask what they monitor and what triggers an alert. If the answer is “customers tell us,” the back end is not finished.

Questions about hiring a back-end freelancer

Which language do you use?

Whatever the project already runs on, within my stack: Python and Django, Node and Express, or Go. For new work I pick based on the problem and who will maintain it. See the Python and Django, JavaScript, and Go pages.

Can you work on just the database?

Yes. Query fixes, schema design, and migrations are common standalone jobs, and they often start as an audit.

Can you connect our back end to other services?

Yes. Payments, messaging, email, and ad platforms are covered on the API and system integrations page.

What does a back-end developer cost?

It depends on scope and experience. You get a written quote after the first call. For market ranges, read what it costs to hire a web developer.

Start with a call

Describe what is slow, failing, or missing, then book a call. If an audit is the right first step, I will say so.