API Development
REST and GraphQL interfaces with versioning, documented schemas, pagination, and consistent error semantics.
Software & Product Engineering
API & Integration Development
Integrations usually work on the first sunny day and fail quietly afterwards, because retries, rate limits, partial failures, and schema changes were never designed for.
Design and build backend services, public and internal APIs, and third-party integrations where the contract, the authentication model, and the failure behaviour are all explicit.
Overview
Design the contract and the failure, not just the call
An integration is a promise between two systems that will change independently. Without a versioned contract, idempotent operations, and defined behaviour for timeouts and rate limits, the promise breaks the first time either side moves.
We define the contract first, then implement the service with authentication, observability, and retry semantics that make failures visible and recoverable instead of silent.
What this includes
API & Integration Development capabilities
A public API and an internal system-to-system link need different parts of this list; scope follows who consumes it.
Backend Development
Application services, domain logic, background processing, and data access designed to be tested and operated.
Third-Party Integrations
Connections to payment, CRM, ERP, logistics, and communication providers with isolation behind explicit interfaces.
Event and message flows
Queues and event patterns where work should be asynchronous, ordered, or retried without duplicating effects.
Integration reliability
Idempotency, backoff, rate-limit handling, and alerting so a failing integration announces itself.
What you receive
Concrete deliverables
- API contract, schema, and documentation
- Service implementation with automated tests
- Authentication, authorization, and secret-handling design
- Monitoring, retry, and failure-notification behaviour
Why it matters
Practical outcomes
Failures are visible
A broken integration raises a signal rather than accumulating missing data.
Consumers can self-serve
Documented contracts let other teams and partners integrate without a meeting.
Retries are safe
Idempotent operations prevent duplicate records when the network misbehaves.
Providers stay replaceable
Third-party services sit behind interfaces the rest of the system does not depend on directly.
Scope and third parties
Integrations depend on the APIs, rate limits, and terms of the third-party providers involved. Feasibility is confirmed against each provider’s current documentation and your access to it.
How an integration engagement runs
From an undocumented connection to an explicit contract.
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Discover systems and contracts
Establish what each system holds, what it can expose, and what its interface actually guarantees.
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Design the contract and auth model
Specify the interface, the authentication model, and the error semantics before implementation begins.
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Implement the service
Build the API or integration against that specification, including the paths that fail.
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Test failure and retry
Test timeouts, partial responses, duplicate deliveries, and the behaviour of the far side when it is down.
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Document and release
Publish the contract, version it, and hand over what a consuming team needs to integrate unaided.
What we hold ourselves to
An integration is defined by how it behaves when the other side breaks.
These are the commitments that keep a connection between systems from becoming a shared fault line.
- 01
The contract is the deliverable
A documented, versioned interface is the product; the implementation behind it can change.
- 02
Failure modes designed, not discovered
Timeouts, retries, and backoff are specified up front rather than added after the first incident.
- 03
Repeat delivery handled safely
Operations are idempotent, because a retried request must not duplicate the work it describes.
- 04
Credential handling at the boundary
Authentication secrets are held in configuration and rotated, never committed or embedded in code.
- 05
Integration traffic observable
Requests and failures are logged with enough context to diagnose which side is at fault.
Relevant technology
What an integration layer is built from
Service code, the messaging that carries events between systems, persistent storage, and the controls at the boundary.
Capability domain
11 tools
Backend
- Laravel
- PHP
- Node.js
- NestJS
- .NET
- ASP.NET Core
- Python
- Django
- FastAPI
- Java
- Spring Boot
Capability domain
5 tools
APIs and Messaging
- REST
- GraphQL
- WebSockets
- RabbitMQ
- Apache Kafka
Capability domain
7 tools
Databases
- PostgreSQL
- MySQL
- SQL Server
- Oracle
- MongoDB
- Redis
- Elasticsearch
Capability domain
5 tools
Security
- OAuth 2.0
- OpenID Connect
- OWASP practices
- Role-based access control
- Secrets management
Scope boundaries
Where this work hands off
Contracts between systems sit beside the applications they serve and the pipelines that deploy them; each is scoped separately.
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Custom Software Development
This work is the contract, the transport, and the failure behaviour between systems. Building the application that sits behind the contract is the wider engagement.
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AI Workflow Automation
An integration moves data between systems on agreed terms. Automating a judgement inside a workflow is a different problem with different oversight requirements.
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DevOps & CI/CD
Services need somewhere to be deployed and a way to get there; establishing that pipeline and environment practice is scoped as delivery engineering.
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Application Security & Hardening
Authentication, authorization, and secret handling are designed as part of the contract; an independent assessment of the resulting surface is separate work.
Illustrative pattern
What happens when the other system is down
When the integration breaks at 2am, what does it do, and how do we find out?
A caller crosses an explicit contract; transient failures retry with backoff, permanent ones are classified rather than swallowed, and anything unrecoverable lands in a queue a person can act on.
A pattern we apply — not delivered customer work.
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Deterministic
Caller
The system initiating the work, which should not need to know how the far side behaves when it is unhealthy.
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Deterministic
Integration contract
An explicit boundary: what is sent, what comes back, what counts as success, and what the timeout is. Written down, not inferred from the last time it worked.
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Failure path
Retry with backoff
Transient failures — a timeout, a rate limit, a 503 — retry on a widening interval, with the operation made idempotent so a retry cannot duplicate the effect.
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Failure path
Classified failure handling
A permanent failure is separated from a transient one and surfaced, rather than retried forever or swallowed into a log nobody reads.
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Manual recovery
Dead-letter and manual recovery
What cannot be completed lands somewhere a person can see it, understand it, and replay it once the cause is fixed.
Questions
Useful context before a consultation
Integration questions usually concern contract stability, authentication, and behaviour when a dependency is unavailable.
Can you integrate a system without a public API?
Sometimes, through supported export, file, or database interfaces. Where only unsupported access exists, we say so and describe the maintenance risk rather than building on it quietly.
REST or GraphQL?
REST suits most service-to-service and partner integrations. GraphQL is useful where varied clients need to shape their own queries. The choice follows the consumers, not preference.
What happens when a provider changes their API?
Providers deprecate and change without asking. Integrations are isolated behind an interface we own, so a provider change is a contained piece of work rather than a search through the application for every place that called them.
How do we know an integration is still working?
A silent integration is the dangerous one. Failures, retries and rate-limit responses are logged and alerted, so a broken connection announces itself instead of being discovered through a missing record weeks later.
Can you build an API for our partners to use?
Yes — with versioning, documented schemas, authentication, and rate limiting decided up front, because a published contract is much harder to change once someone else depends on it.
Start a conversation
Discuss an API or integration
Tell us which systems need to agree with each other and what currently gets reconciled by hand.