Dedicated API Engineers
Hire API Developers
API engineers who design the contract before the implementation.
An API is a promise to every client that will ever call it. Changing it later costs far more than getting it right once.
Quick Answer
Updated August 22, 2026
What does it cost to hire an API developer?
A senior API developer from India costs $32–$45 per hour, roughly ₹3.5–5 lakh per month on a dedicated engagement. API work is where a written contract up front saves the most money: when the web team, the mobile team, and the backend team are each guessing at the shape of a response, integration takes weeks that a one-page agreed schema would have removed entirely.
Senior hourly rate
$32 – $45
Deliverable
Versioned API plus OpenAPI docs
Time to start
5 – 10 working days
Best for
- Products with web and mobile clients sharing one backend
- Integrations with payment, logistics, or CRM providers
- Teams that need a public or partner-facing API
Not best for
- Single-client apps where a tightly coupled backend is fine
- Work where nobody can decide on the data model
- Integrations with providers whose own API is fundamentally broken
Rate Card
What does it cost to hire api developers?
API work prices at the standard backend band. Integration projects with a fixed provider list are usually better as fixed-scope engagements than dedicated seats.
| Level | Experience | Monthly (INR) | Hourly (USD) | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mid-level | 3–5 years | ₹2,20,000 – ₹3,20,000 | $22 – $32 | Feature delivery inside an existing codebase and review structure |
| Senior | 5–8 years | ₹3,50,000 – ₹5,00,000 | $32 – $45 | Owning a module end to end, setting patterns, reviewing others |
| Lead / architect | 8+ years | ₹5,00,000 – ₹6,50,000 | $45 – $60 | Architecture, delivery sequencing, and technical accountability |
Rates are for dedicated engagements with at least four hours of daily overlap with your working hours. Longer commitments reduce the rate; more overlap increases it.
Capability
What our api developers actually do
- REST design — resources, status codes, pagination, filtering, and error shapes
- Versioning strategy that lets you change things without breaking existing clients
- Authentication for third parties: API keys, OAuth, scoped tokens, and rotation
- Webhook delivery and ingestion with signing, retries, and replay
- Rate limiting, quotas, and abuse protection
- Payment gateway integration where a duplicate callback must never double-charge
Working stack
We staff for the stack you already run wherever we can. Where we think a different choice would serve you better, we will say so once — with the reasoning — and then work in yours.
Common Engagements
What teams usually hire API engineers for
Payment gateway integration
Stripe or Razorpay wired with idempotency keys and signed webhooks, so a retried callback cannot charge a customer twice.
Partner-facing public API
Scoped keys, rate limits, versioning, and documentation good enough that partners integrate without asking you questions.
Third-party integration layer
A single service that absorbs the quirks of external providers so the rest of your codebase stays clean.
Backend-for-frontend
A tailored API layer per client so mobile is not forced to consume responses designed for a desktop dashboard.
Vetting
How we decide who is good enough to place
Vetting is the entire value of hiring through an agency rather than a marketplace. If we are not rejecting most applicants, we are not doing the job you are paying for.
Step 1
Technical interview
A senior engineer from our team runs the interview. Not a recruiter with a checklist, and not an automated coding test.
Step 2
Practical exercise
A task close to the work you are actually hiring for, reviewed the way we would review a pull request.
Step 3
Reference and delivery check
We ask what they shipped recently, who reviewed it, and what went wrong on it. The last question is the useful one.
Step 4
Fit call with you
You speak to the engineer before committing. If the fit is wrong at that point, nothing has been signed.
Comparison
Contract-first APIs vs endpoints added on demand
The difference does not show up in month one. It shows up when the second client integrates.
With SoftwareCrafting
- Schema agreed and documented before implementation starts
- Idempotency keys on every operation that spends money or changes state
- Versioning planned from the first release, not retrofitted under pressure
- Contract tests so a breaking change fails CI rather than a customer
Typical alternative
- Endpoints shaped by whatever the current screen needs
- Duplicate webhooks discovered through a double-charged customer
- Breaking changes shipped and communicated by email afterwards
- Documentation written once and stale within a month
Engagement Models
Four ways to work with us, and when each one fits
Dedicated seat
One engineer working full time inside your team, your repo, and your process. Monthly rolling, two weeks notice.
Ongoing roadmap work with no defined end date
Part-time seat
From roughly 20 hours a week. Below that, context reloading eats most of the value, and we will say so.
Specialist input alongside an existing team
Fixed-scope project
A defined deliverable at an agreed price. Only where scope is genuinely clear enough to fix without a change-request cycle.
Migrations, audits, and well-specified builds
Delivery pod
Three to four people including QA and a named delivery owner accountable for the sprint outcome.
Whole product areas you want owned end to end
What you get either way
- You interview the engineer before anything is signed
- Replacement at our cost if the fit is wrong in the first two weeks
- IP assignment and NDA signed before technical access is granted
- Code committed to your repository, under your organisation, from day one
- Monthly rolling contract — two weeks notice, no annual lock-in
Quick Brief
Start the conversation here
Tell us the role, the stack, and when you need someone. We will come back with availability and a rate.
Your Name
Work Email
What do you need help with?
FAQ
Questions buyers ask before hiring API engineers
How much does it cost to hire an API developer?
The standard backend band from India: $22–$32 per hour mid-level, $32–$45 per hour senior. Integration-heavy projects with a defined provider list are often better priced as fixed-scope work.
Do you build REST or GraphQL?
REST for most products, because it is simpler to cache, document, and debug. GraphQL where you genuinely have many clients with divergent data needs. We will not sell you a GraphQL layer for a single web app.
How do you handle payment webhooks safely?
Signature verification, idempotency keys stored against the provider event ID, and processing in a queue rather than inline. A retried webhook then becomes a no-op instead of a second charge.
Do you provide API documentation?
Yes, generated from the code via OpenAPI so it cannot silently drift from the implementation. Hand-written API documentation is wrong within weeks in our experience.
Can you integrate with a legacy or badly documented API?
Yes, and it is common work. We start by capturing what the provider actually returns rather than trusting their documentation, then build an adapter layer so their quirks stay in one place.
Related services
The service pages behind this role
What this engineer works on day to day, and how we scope it commercially.