Backend and API development in Los Angeles
Behind most Los Angeles media products is a backend that decides who may watch what. A title is licensed for one territory and not another, available on one platform from one date and gone from it on another, and free with adverts in one window and paid in the next. When those rules live in spreadsheets and ad hoc code, content goes live where it should not, or disappears where it should be.
We build media backends in Node and Python where rights and windows are data with dates and territories attached, checked on every request rather than remembered by a person. Around that sits the ingest pipeline: uploads straight to object storage, transcoding with ffmpeg in workers that can be retried safely, and metadata that stays attached to every rendition.
Los Angeles buys software for businesses that make things people watch, wear, listen to and fly. Entertainment and media are the obvious ones: studios, streaming services, post-production houses, music companies, games and the creator economy that grew up around them. Alongside them sit consumer brands selling direct to customers online, a fast-growing aerospace cluster around El Segundo and the South Bay, and the logistics trade that runs through the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. The buyer might be a creator with an audience, a studio's technology team or the operations lead at a launch company.
Each brings a different system. Media is heavy: video has to be ingested, transcoded, stored and served, storage and egress costs grow faster than anything else on the bill, and rights and territory windows decide who may watch what, where and when. Consumer brands live with launch-day spikes, when one post or one drop sends a surge of traffic in minutes. Creator platforms need moderation that keeps the product feeling fast. The South Bay's aerospace companies grow quickly and need the commercial software around the engineering: hiring and supplier portals, fan and merchandise stores, and the scheduling and operations tools a company outgrows spreadsheets for.
Built In puts the average base salary for a software engineer in Los Angeles at around $147,000, and studios, streamers and the large technology campuses in the city compete for the same people. Much of the work here also runs to a fixed date: a premiere, a new season, a product drop, a launch window. When the date is set and the team is short, a senior engineer who can start in days on a defined piece of work is often the quickest way to hit it.
We work from Bengaluru with four hours of live overlap every working day, placed across your morning in Los Angeles. Stand-ups, reviews and launch planning happen in that window, with the engineer who writes the code. Everything decided outside it goes into your repository, your tracker and the runbooks we write as we go, so each morning starts with a clear record of what moved.
We fit best around a fixed date: a store before a drop, a media pipeline before a new season, a creator app before launch, or commercial tools for a fast-growing South Bay company. Senior capacity starts in days, usually with a fixed-price two-week piece. Agencies can bring us in white-label, under their own name.
Four ways this arrives.
We read the code, write down what it does versus what everyone believes it does, and give you the list of the five things most likely to page someone at night. Then we fix those first.
Usually queries, not architecture. We profile under real traffic, fix the plans and the indexes, and only then discuss whether anything needs splitting apart.
A mobile client, a partner integration, a public API. We design the contract first, version it properly, and write the docs your consumers will read.
Jobs that silently vanish, retries that duplicate charges, a queue nobody monitors. We make it idempotent, observable, and boring.
A moderated messaging backend where sends acknowledge in-band and the review runs behind them.
Read the write-up →Asked by Los Angeles teams.
How do you work with teams in Los Angeles?+
We are in Bengaluru, with four hours of live overlap every working day placed across your Los Angeles morning. That window holds stand-ups, design reviews and launch planning, and you talk to the engineer who writes the code. We work in your Slack, your GitHub and your Linear, so progress shows up where your team already looks. Work finished outside the window is written up there too, ready when your day starts.
Do you build for media and entertainment companies?+
Yes. We build ingest and transcoding pipelines, rights and territory windows held as data, review platforms with expiring, watermarked links for outside collaborators, and archive search that finds a line of dialogue by its timecode. For labels and creator networks, we build the pipelines that turn platform statements into accurate payouts. Each piece is scoped to ship before the premiere, season or release date it is meant for.
How does your rate compare to hiring in Los Angeles?+
Built In puts the average base salary for a software engineer in Los Angeles at about $147,000, before equity, benefits and recruiting fees. Our published rate is $35 an hour, with a $5,000 minimum. You skip the months of recruiting and the employment overhead, and we can start within days. A fixed-price two-week piece at $2,800 is the usual beginning, so you judge us on what ships.
Can you work white-label for a Los Angeles agency?+
Yes. Many Los Angeles creative and digital agencies win the brief and then need engineering behind it. We build under your name: your client sees your agency and your process, and we work inside your Slack, tracker and repositories. We can join client calls in the overlap window or stay behind the scenes. An NDA comes first, and the code belongs to your client from the first commit.
Can you work in our existing codebase?+
Yes, and it is most of what we do. We do not require a rewrite as a condition of working with you. If we think a rewrite is genuinely the right call we will say so, with the reasoning and the cost, and you can decide.
What if the backend is in a language you do not list?+
Then we will tell you. We are useful in Node, Python and TypeScript. We can read Go and PHP well enough to migrate off them. We would not take a Rust or Elixir project and learn it on your budget.
Do you write tests?+
For anything with money, permissions or data loss in it, yes. We do not chase a coverage number. We will tell you which parts are covered and which are not in the handover notes.
Who owns the code?+
You do, from the first commit. Repositories live in your organisation. If we set them up, we transfer them before the first invoice.
What happens when the engagement ends?+
You get runbooks, architecture notes and a recorded walkthrough. We stay available for questions for a month at no cost, because a handover that needs us on retainer is not a handover.