Production-grade REST and GraphQL APIs, secured and integrated.
We design and build the APIs your products, partners, and integrations run on: clean REST and typed GraphQL endpoints, versioned so they don’t break callers, secured at the gateway, and documented so other teams can consume them without a meeting.
Authentication, rate limiting, validation, and monitoring are built in, not bolted on — and every line ships in your own cloud. Fixed scope, one accountable lead, production in 4–8 weeks.
Because an endpoint that returns JSON in a demo is maybe ten percent of an API. The other ninety percent is the part that gets skipped under deadline: a versioning scheme so a change doesn’t break every mobile app in the field, validation so bad input can’t corrupt a record, auth and rate limiting so one caller can’t take the whole service down, and documentation so the next team can integrate without reverse-engineering your code.
Skip it and you get the familiar outcome — an API that works until it’s load-bearing, then becomes a fragile dependency every change has to tiptoe around, with security gaps you find out about the hard way.
That fragility is expensive: in Salt Labs’ Q1 2025 State of API Security Report, 99% of organizations hit an API security issue in the prior year, and 55% had delayed shipping a new application because of API security concerns (Salt Security, Feb 2025). The part you skip is exactly what decides whether an API speeds the business up or quietly holds it back.
“API development” isn’t one deliverable; it’s a set of specific jobs, each tied to a concrete outcome. For each: what it does, the benefit it produces, and a one-line illustration of the help.
Expose your platform’s capabilities to external developers and partners through a stable, documented, versioned contract. Benefit — new distribution and revenue without bespoke integration work each time. A clean public API turns “build us a custom feed” requests into self-serve onboarding.
Example: a partner integrates your data in days against your published docs instead of waiting a quarter for a one-off export — so the deal closes on the partner’s timeline, not your backlog’s.
Connect your systems to the payment, CRM, accounting, logistics, or vertical platforms your operation depends on. Benefit — data flows automatically where staff used to copy it by hand. Fewer manual touchpoints means fewer errors and reclaimed hours.
Example: a paid invoice in the payment processor posts straight into the accounting ledger and updates the CRM — so finance stops reconciling three screens at month-end.
Give web and mobile clients a typed, purpose-shaped API — often GraphQL — that returns exactly the data each screen needs. Benefit — faster client teams and lighter, quicker apps. One round trip replaces five; the client team stops waiting on backend changes.
Example: a mobile screen that needed four REST calls fetches its whole payload in one typed GraphQL query — so the screen loads faster and the app team ships without a backend ticket.
Put a clean, modern API in front of an aging system you can’t replace yet, so new products build against the contract instead of the mainframe. Benefit — modernize at the edges without a risky rip-and-replace. New work moves fast while the core stays stable.
Example: a new customer portal reads through a modern API layer instead of touching the legacy database directly — so the portal ships now and the core migration can wait for its own project.
Build low-latency WebSocket and event APIs for live data — status updates, notifications, streaming, collaboration. Benefit — live experiences without clients hammering the server to poll.
Example: an order-status screen updates the moment fulfillment changes state instead of polling every thirty seconds — so the customer sees “shipped” in real time and support fields fewer “where is it?” calls.
Define the contracts your own services talk over, with consistent auth, error shapes, and versioning across teams. Benefit — teams ship in parallel against stable interfaces instead of blocking on each other. When the goal is decomposing a system into many such services, that’s microservices development — this page is the API layer itself.
Example: two squads build against an agreed contract simultaneously and integrate cleanly on day one — instead of one waiting weeks for the other’s undocumented endpoint.
The scope below is the difference between a production API and an endpoint that becomes a liability.
Clean, resource-oriented REST APIs designed around your domain — consistent naming, predictable error shapes, pagination, and an OpenAPI specification so the contract is documentation, mocks, and client SDKs in one.
Typed GraphQL schemas that let many different clients ask for exactly the data they need in one request — strongly typed end to end, with the resolver and performance work (query depth limits, batching, N+1 prevention) that keeps a flexible API from becoming a slow one.
Third-party, payment, CRM, accounting, and partner integrations, plus wrapping legacy systems behind a modern contract — so your products build against a clean API instead of brittle point-to-point connections.
A gateway that centralizes authentication, authorization, and rate limiting, with OAuth 2.0 / JWT / API-key auth, request validation, and the OWASP API Security Top 10 designed against from the start — security as a property of the platform, not a patch.
A versioning strategy that lets the API evolve without breaking existing callers, plus published docs, examples, and a sandbox so other teams — and external partners — can integrate without a meeting.
Low-latency, event-driven endpoints (WebSocket, server-sent events) for live status, notifications, and streaming use cases — built with the same auth and monitoring as the rest of the surface.
Take over an existing API: add the missing tests and docs, close the security gaps, fix the latency and reliability problems, and harden it for the load it’s actually carrying.
What you get when you hire us — all assigned to you under full work-for-hire IP
The same delivery model behind all our software work, tuned for APIs — one accountable lead, fixed scope, no handoffs.
Model the resources or schema, the auth model, versioning, and error shapes, and write the OpenAPI / GraphQL spec first.
Output: an agreed API contract callers can build against
Implement the API in your own cloud tenant in Node.js and TypeScript, with validation, auth, and contract tests in place from the first endpoint.
Output: a working, tested API behind your access controls
Wire it to your systems of record and any third-party platforms through governed, permissioned connections, and stand up the gateway.
Output: an API connected to the systems it serves
Load-test, close OWASP-class gaps, instrument monitoring and rate limiting, publish the docs and sandbox, and train your team.
Output: a production API & a team that owns it
Production in 4–8 weeks, full IP assignment signed at kickoff, payment tied to the outcome we agreed to deliver.
There’s no substitute for having built the transaction infrastructure a business runs on. For YardClub — a contractor-to-contractor marketplace for heavy equipment — we built the full platform end to end, including the listings, payments, and transaction APIs that processed $120M+ in transactions before the company was acquired by Caterpillar in 2017.
That is API work where a bug isn’t a cosmetic glitch; it’s a mishandled payment. The same payment and transaction-API engineering is what we bring to ecommerce and fintech integrations today.
Reliability under change is the other half. The production discipline that holds BJ’s Restaurants — a 200+ location chain — at twice-a-week releases with zero critical defects across four years is the same discipline that keeps an API stable while everything calling it keeps moving: contract tests before a change ships, staged rollout, monitoring after.
APIs are the backbone of every system we build, and they have to stay reliable while the rest of the system changes around them.
Silicon Prime is a Stanford-rooted Responsible AI lab, founded in 2011, run by founder Kelvin Tran — 20+ years of production engineering, personally accountable for every engagement.
We’ve built transaction infrastructure at scale. Payments and marketplace APIs that moved $120M+ (YardClub, acquired by Caterpillar) — not a first attempt on your dime.
Reliability is the product. The discipline that ships a 200+ location business twice a week with zero critical defects is the discipline behind an API you can put load on.
In-house full stack, one accountable lead. No account managers, no offshore handoff — the person who designs the contract answers for the API in production.
Built to transfer. The schema, contract tests, gateway config, docs, and code are assigned to you; your team is trained to run and extend the API when we step back.
Payment, ledger, and real-time decisioning APIs where every call needs an audit trail and the security model assumes authenticated traffic can still be hostile. Fintech software →
Integration APIs across EHR and clinical systems inside HIPAA-compliant architectures, every data path documented and logged. Healthcare software →
Catalog, order, payment, and partner APIs built to carry transaction volume — the same surface area we built for a marketplace that processed $120M+.
What teams want to know before they commit to building the API their products run on.
Whichever fits the consumers. REST is the right default for resource-oriented APIs and public/partner access where caching and simplicity matter; GraphQL wins when many different clients need different shapes of data and you want to avoid over-fetching and a proliferation of endpoints. We often build both on the same backend. We decide it with your actual clients and data on the table during design — not by preference — and the choice is reversible at the edges because the business logic sits behind the API, not inside it.
Yes — that’s a large part of the work. We build integrations to payment processors, CRMs, accounting, logistics, and vertical platforms, and we wrap legacy systems behind a clean modern API so new products build against the contract instead of the old system directly. We scope each integration against the platform’s real API and its rate limits, rather than assuming a connector will just work.
Security is designed in at the gateway, not patched on. Authentication via OAuth 2.0, JWT, or API keys; authorization checked per request; rate limiting and input validation by default; and the OWASP API Security Top 10 designed against from the first endpoint. We assume authenticated traffic can be hostile — in Salt Labs’ Q1 2025 report, 95% of API attacks came from authenticated sources (Salt Security, Feb 2025) — so authorization is enforced on every call, not just at login.
No — that’s what versioning is for. We design a versioning strategy up front so the API can evolve without breaking callers already in the field, ship breaking changes behind new versions with a deprecation path, and use contract tests so a change that would break a consumer fails in CI rather than in production.
Every REST API ships with an OpenAPI specification and every GraphQL API with a typed schema — both machine-readable, so the contract drives documentation, mock servers, and client SDKs instead of going stale in a wiki. We deliver published docs, request/response examples, and a sandbox so your teams and external partners can integrate without booking a call with us.
You do — completely. The schema, contract tests, gateway configuration, documentation, and source code transfer under full work-for-hire IP assignment signed at kickoff, all running in your own cloud tenant, and your team is trained to operate and extend it. Keep us on a reduced retainer or take the keys — the engagement is built around the handover.
Most APIs reach production in 4–8 weeks under a fixed-scope engagement with one accountable lead and payment tied to the agreed outcome. Cost depends on scope — the number of endpoints, integrations, and the security and real-time requirements — and our AI development cost guide gives real ranges to anchor a budget before we scope.
Thirty minutes · No pitch deck
Bring the use case — the consumers, the systems to integrate, the load you expect — and we’ll tell you honestly what it takes to build it right, what it costs, and how fast it can be in production.