Backend and API development in Mumbai
A lending or payments backend in Mumbai is judged first by whether the money is right. A loan ledger that drifts from the bank statement, a disbursal retried twice because a partner bank timed out, a repayment recorded against the wrong instalment: each one is a problem for operations on Monday and for finance at month end. Every integration with a partner bank, a payment gateway or a credit bureau adds another place where the numbers can quietly part company.
We build and repair these backends in Node and Python. Every state change on a loan or a payment is recorded with who made it and when, retries are idempotent so a timeout cannot become a double disbursal, and daily reconciliation against the bank's own records flags a difference before finance finds it. We work inside the system you already run, and we write down what we changed and why, so your own team can carry it on.
Mumbai is India's financial capital. Both major stock exchanges are here, and so are many of the country's banks, NBFCs, brokers, wealth managers, insurers and fintechs. For these companies software is judged first on whether the money is right. A loan ledger that drifts from the bank statement, a payout released twice because a partner timed out, a portfolio screen showing yesterday's price: each one lands on an operations desk the next morning. What they need built is rarely a new product from nothing. It is a lending or payments backend that reconciles, a platform where each role sees exactly what it should, and approvals that need two people before money moves. Engineers who have built those systems are in demand across the city, so the work often waits for a hire.
The city's second industry is attention. The Hindi film industry, most of the country's television networks and many of its large publishers are based here, and their software problems are specific: traffic that arrives all at once on a release or a match day, rights and metadata that decide what can be shown where, and archives that are valuable only if someone can search them. A slow page on a publisher's site is lost revenue, because the readers came from search and will go straight back to it.
The third is consumer business in every size. Mumbai has D2C brands selling beauty, fashion and food through their own stores and every marketplace at once, and it is home to large family-owned groups and conglomerates whose older divisions still run on spreadsheets and exports from their accounting software. In the bigger groups the buyer is usually a digital team with a mandate, a budget and a procurement process, and the work has to survive that process as well as production.
We are in Bengaluru and share your time zone, so the working day is the same on both sides and a question asked in the morning is answered the same morning. You talk directly to the engineer who writes the code. The work happens in your repository and a shared chat channel, where every decision is written down, and the runbooks and architecture notes are written as we go rather than at the end.
We are the right fit when a Mumbai team has a defined piece of work and wants a senior engineer on it within days: a ledger that has to reconcile, a migration with an end date, or extra capacity while you hire. Start with a fixed-price two-week piece, or bring us in white-label for your agency's clients under your 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 Mumbai teams.
How do you work with teams in Mumbai?+
We are in Bengaluru and share your time zone, so calls, reviews and releases fit inside your normal working day. We work in your tools, Slack, GitHub and Linear or whatever your team already uses, and every decision is written down in the repository or the channel. You talk directly to the engineer writing the code, from the first 30-minute call through to handover, with runbooks and architecture notes written as we go.
Do you build for Mumbai lenders, brokers and fintechs?+
Yes. We build the parts where the money has to be right: loan and payment ledgers that reconcile against the bank's records every day, retries that cannot turn a timeout into a double payout, maker-checker approvals where a second person signs off before money moves, and a full history of every change of state. We work inside the system you already run, in Node, Python and Next.js, and ship in increments.
How does your rate compare to hiring in Mumbai?+
PayScale puts a mid-career software engineer in Mumbai at about ₹15 lakh a year. Our published rate is $35 an hour, with a $5,000 minimum. That buys a senior engineer who writes the code, works in your Slack, GitHub and Linear, and starts within days, with no recruiting round, notice period or employment overhead. Start with a fixed-price two-week piece at $2,800 and judge us on the output before committing to more.
Can you work white-label for our Mumbai agency?+
Yes. Mumbai's digital and media agencies bring us in when a client needs a backend, a mobile app or a data pipeline alongside the design and campaign work. We work under your name, in your client's repositories and your channels, and sign an NDA before specifics. The code belongs to the client from the first commit. You keep the relationship, we write the code and the runbooks, and your team presents the work.
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.