Backend and API development in Sydney
Real-time payments changed what a Sydney lender's or fintech's backend has to do. On the New Payments Platform, money moves in seconds, PayTo mandates replace direct debits, and the customer expects the app to reflect it immediately. A backend built for overnight batch files now has to handle instant confirmations, retries from the payment provider, and a ledger that must never record the same payment twice.
We work on that backend: idempotent payment handling, reconciliation against what the bank actually settled, clear state for every mandate and payment, and a readable history of every change to a payment that your finance and support teams can follow. We work in Node and Python on PostgreSQL, inside your codebase rather than around it, and every change to a money path ships with the test that proves it.
Sydney is where Australian money keeps its head office. Commonwealth Bank, Westpac and Macquarie run their groups from the city, the large insurers are here, and around them sits a dense fintech sector in payments, lending and wealth. The software these firms need is rarely a brand-new product. It is the work around the core: payment flows that settle in seconds, onboarding and lending journeys customers actually finish, reports that agree with each other, and the internal tools that keep claims and complaints moving.
Real-time payments have raised the bar. On the New Payments Platform money moves in seconds, and PayTo lets a business take agreed payments straight from a customer's account, so a lender or fintech built around overnight batch files now needs instant confirmations and a ledger that never records the same payment twice. Sydney is also where Atlassian and Canva started, so its buyers have been trained by good software built down the road. A clunky internal tool or a slow sign-up flow is noticed here in a way it might not be elsewhere. Beyond finance, the city has a large property and strata sector, online retailers shipping across a very big country, and a startup scene around Tech Central.
Hiring reflects all of that. Indeed puts the average base salary for a software engineer in Sydney at A$119,602, from 526 reported salaries, and experienced engineers are contested by the banks, the big product companies and every well-funded startup at once. A team that needs a payments engineer or an extra pair of senior hands for a quarter can wait a long time for the right hire. That is where we are useful: a defined piece of work, started within days, with the code in your repositories from the first commit.
Our four hours of daily overlap land in your afternoon, and we move them to suit your team. Your morning stays with your own people; the afternoon is when you talk to the engineer writing your code, in stand-ups, reviews and design decisions. Runbooks and architecture notes are written as we go, so whoever joins your team next inherits work they can read.
We are the right fit when you have a defined piece of work and want senior engineers on it within days, or when the Sydney hire you need is months away and the roadmap keeps moving. Start with a fixed-price two-week piece and judge us on the output. Agencies can put the work 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 Sydney teams.
How do you work with teams in Sydney?+
We are in Bengaluru and share four hours of live overlap with you every day, in your afternoon, moved to suit your team. That is when we join stand-ups, review pull requests and take design calls. We work in your tools, whether that is Slack, GitHub or Linear, and the person on every call is the engineer who writes the code. Between calls, progress is in your tracker and your repositories.
Do you build for Sydney banks, insurers and fintechs?+
Yes, and that is most of what Sydney asks us for. We build payment backends that handle NPP and PayTo without recording a payment twice, sign-up and lending journeys customers finish on their phone, complaint and claims tools that take the reading off skilled staff, and data pipelines that make finance and risk reports agree. We work inside your codebase and your cloud, starting with the one flow that matters most.
How does your rate compare to hiring in Sydney?+
Indeed puts the average base salary for a software engineer in Sydney at around A$120,000. Our published rate is $35/hour with a $5,000 minimum, or $5,400 a month for one embedded engineer. There is no recruiting time and no employment overhead, and work starts within days of the call. The first piece is a fixed-price two-week engagement at $2,800, so you judge us on what ships.
Can you take over an app another team built?+
Yes. It is a common starting point for Sydney products whose agency or founding engineers have moved on. We read the code, run it, and write down how it fits together and where the risks sit. The first fixed-price two-week piece is usually one real fix or feature, so you see the handover working while the architecture notes build up. The code stays in your repositories throughout, as it always would.
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.