API contracts
Endpoints other teams can rely on, with explicit errors, versioning, and tests around the cases clients actually hit.
Hire backend developers
Hire senior backend developers from the Philippines
Arca places senior backend developers from the Philippines and Asia with US companies for $35/hr, all-in, with no recruiting fee. You will meet a shortlist within 7 working days. Your developer works your full US business day on a month-to-month engagement, with unlimited replacements.
The role
What a senior backend developer owns on your team
A senior backend developer owns the server side of the product: the contracts other code depends on, and the data those contracts write.
Data models
Schema changes that can run while the product is live, including the backfill and the rollback.
Jobs and integrations
Background work, webhooks, and third-party APIs, with retries that do not double-charge or double-write.
Performance
The slow query, the hot lock, and the endpoint that falls over at your real traffic, not a benchmark.
Operational clues
Logs, metrics, and traces that let the next person see why a request failed without reproducing it by luck.
On-call during your day
Online for the US business day so a failed job is a conversation, not a morning surprise.
Is it the right hire?
When a backend developer is the right hire
- The product's limit is the API or the data model, not the screens.
- Integrations are failing in ways the current team cannot see quickly enough.
- You already have frontend capacity and the server work is the queue.
- A migration or a rewrite of a core service needs someone who has done it on a live system.
The work may sit on both sides of the stack. full-stack developers or software engineers.
Stacks
Skills we match on
Tell us your stack and we will screen for engineers who have shipped production code in it.
- Node.js
- Python
- Go
- Java
- PostgreSQL
- Redis
- Kafka
- gRPC
- AWS
How we match
Matched to the services you run
We start with the hiring manager and the services this person will touch. For a backend hire, that often means:
- Production APIs in the language you are hiring for, not a tutorial service.
- A migration or a backfill they can explain, including what they would not do again.
- Failure handling: idempotency, timeouts, and what happens when a dependency is down.
- Experience at a similar volume, so the design matches your traffic rather than a bigger company's.
- Care with data: what is stored, who can read it, and how a bad write gets undone.
Our team are technologists. We screen a large number of candidates and introduce only the best. You interview them and decide.
Cost
What this hire costs
| Hiring route | Per hour |
|---|---|
| ArcaSenior, all-in | $35/hr |
| Latin American staffing firms, senior | ~$45–$72/hr |
| US in-house hire, fully loaded | ~$94–$119/hr |
US figure: median to 75th-percentile hourly wage for software developers (BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025: $65.38–$82.68), divided by 0.692, the wage share of total compensation for private-industry professional workers (BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation, June 2026). Latin American figure: published senior staffing-firm rates, converted at 160 hours a month. BLS wage table for software developers · BLS employer cost release. Market pay in the Philippines: software engineer salaries in the Philippines.
Included in the $35/hr rate
- Your developer's compensation and contract
- Dedicated account manager
- HR, onboarding, and performance reviews
- Training and mentoring
- Month-to-month, no recruiting fee
- Unlimited replacements
How hiring works
Three steps to a backend developer
Discovery call
The services, the data stores, and the failure modes this role has to live with.
Day 0Interview your shortlist
Backend candidates screened against those systems. You interview and choose.
Within 7 working daysStart
They join your repo, your on-call channel, and your US hours. We handle contracts and HR.
When you chooseInterviewing
Questions to ask a senior backend candidate
Use these alongside your own technical interview. You make the hiring decision.
Describe a schema change you shipped while users were writing data.
Look for expand-and-contract, a backfill, and a rollback that does not lose writes.
How do you make a webhook or a job safe to retry?
Senior answers talk about idempotency keys, exactly-once illusions, and the user-visible outcome.
Walk through a slow endpoint you actually fixed.
Listen for measurement first: the query, the lock, or the downstream call, not a guessed cache.
Where should authorization live in this kind of API?
They should be able to say who checks the permission, and what a missing check costs you.
Teams also hire
Roles that pair with this one
Software engineers
Senior generalists who take a feature from ticket to production and own it after release.
Hire software engineersFull-stack developers
One engineer across UI, API, and database, for teams that need features shipped end to end.
Hire full-stack developersDevOps engineers
CI/CD, infrastructure as code, observability, and cloud cost control.
Hire DevOps engineersAI engineers
Engineers who build LLM features, agents, and retrieval systems into real products, quickly.
Hire AI engineersBackend developers: FAQ
How much does a senior backend developer from the Philippines cost?
Through Arca, from $35/hr, all-in. That includes compensation, contracts, HR, account management, and training, with no recruiting fee.
How quickly can I hire a backend developer?
Arca sends a shortlist in 7 working days from your discovery call. You interview the candidates and choose.
Do they only write APIs, or do they own the data too?
We match the scope you describe. A senior backend hire usually owns the API, the schema, and the jobs that write the data, unless you want a narrower brief.
Will they be online for US incidents?
Yes. Arca engineers work your full US business day, whatever your time zone.
Where are they based?
In the Philippines and elsewhere in Asia. The hours they work are your US business day either way.
Can you match a specific language or datastore?
Yes. Tell us the language, the database, and the queue or cloud you need production experience in.
What if they are not a fit?
We replace them. Replacements are unlimited for as long as you're a client, and the engagement is month-to-month.
Hire a backend developer who works your hours.
Tell us the role. We will introduce your shortlist.