One clean API layer
every system can rely on.

It depends on your consumers. REST with an OpenAPI contract is the right default for partner and public APIs, universal tooling, cacheable, easy to version. GraphQL earns its keep when several clients need different slices of the same data, a mobile app, a web app and a partner dashboard querying one schema instead of you shipping bespoke endpoints for each. Plenty of our builds use both: GraphQL inside, REST at the partner edge.

Schema-first: the OpenAPI spec or GraphQL SDL is the source of truth, and reference docs, mock servers and typed clients are generated from it, so documentation cannot drift from behavior, because drift fails the CI build. Versioning is a published policy: additive changes ship freely, breaking changes get a new version with a deprecation window, sunset headers and per-consumer usage tracking.

OAuth 2.0 client credentials for machine-to-machine access, authorization-code flows where users are involved, and scoped short-lived API keys where full OAuth is overkill. Every consumer gets its own credentials with its own scopes, revocable individually, with TLS everywhere, rotation procedures documented and every request attributable in the audit log.

Limits are enforced at the gateway, NGINX or Cloudflare, per key and per consumer, with separate burst and sustained quotas and proper 429 responses carrying Retry-After headers. Anomalies alert before they become outages, and one misbehaving or compromised consumer gets throttled or revoked without anyone else noticing.

We agree p95 latency targets in writing during the contract phase and prove them with load tests before launch, not after. Under the hood that means N+1 queries eliminated with dataloaders and proper joins, Redis caching on repeated reads, and cursor pagination on every list endpoint. Post-launch, gateway dashboards and Sentry watch the same numbers we committed to.

Yes, legacy wrapping is some of our most-requested work. We design a clean, documented contract for how the system should look from outside, then build an adapter layer that translates to the SOAP service, stored procedures or file drops underneath. Modern systems integrate against the facade, the fragile core stays untouched, and you gain a strangler-fig path to replace it later without breaking a single consumer.

You own everything, code, contract, gateway config, docs portal, and every launch ships with runbooks and a handover. Most clients keep the same pod on a light retainer for deprecation management, new endpoints and load-test refreshes, but it is optional. Either way, your team can run it from the documentation alone.

The design review is fixed-price. A first production API, contract, build, hardening, docs portal, typically runs six to ten weeks and is quoted as a fixed project after the audit; a signed contract and running mock server land inside two weeks. Legacy wraps and partner programs are scoped the same way: no day rates that reward slow delivery.