Hire Dedicated API Integration DevelopersVetted by Miracuves · Embedded in Your Integration Layer

API developer or API integration developer: which one do you need?

An API developer builds your own API: the endpoints, data model, authentication and documentation that other apps call. An API integration developer connects your product to APIs other companies run - payment providers, CRMs, ERPs, shipping and messaging services - and keeps those connections working when the other side changes, slows down or fails.

Most teams searching for an API developer need both skills at different times. If you are designing a public or partner API from scratch, say so in the brief and the shortlist leans toward API design. If the backlog is mostly third-party connectors, webhooks and sync jobs, you want an integration specialist. For a fixed-scope API build rather than a hire, see our API development service.

Can I hire a developer just for payment gateway integration - Stripe, PayPal or Razorpay?

Yes. Payment work is one of the most common briefs for this role: checkout and subscription flows, saved cards through the provider's tokenization, refunds, payouts, marketplace splits and the webhooks that confirm each payment. A dedicated Stripe, PayPal or Razorpay developer also handles the parts that break later - webhook signature checks, idempotent retries so nobody is charged twice, and daily reconciliation against the provider's settlement reports.

The scope is integration, not certification. The work is built to PCI DSS requirements; certification is the merchant's and provider's. In practice that means card data goes to the provider's hosted payment fields or SDK and never touches your servers. If you need your own gateway built rather than connected, see payment gateway development.

What does an API gateway developer do?

An API gateway sits in front of your services and handles what every request needs: authentication, rate limits, routing, request validation, caching and logging. A dedicated API gateway developer configures that layer - on Apigee, AWS API Gateway or the gateway you already run - and keeps its policies in version control rather than in a console only one person understands. Hire for it when you expose APIs to partners or mobile apps, or when several services need one front door.

• Auth at the edge: OAuth 2.0 scopes, API keys and mTLS for partners
• Rate limits and quotas per client, so one partner cannot starve the rest
• Versioned routes, so old clients keep working while new ones move on
• Gateway logs and metrics wired into your alerting

REST, GraphQL or webhooks: which should an integration use?

They solve different problems, and most products end up using all three. REST suits resource-shaped data and is what most third-party providers publish, so it is the default for calling other companies' systems. GraphQL suits a client that needs to choose exactly which fields it gets, such as a mobile app reading from several services, and it needs care with query cost and caching.

Webhooks are how a provider tells you something happened - a payment succeeded, a contract was signed - without you polling. They arrive late, twice or out of order, so the handler must verify the signature, store the event and process it idempotently. Your developer picks per integration and writes the choice into the spec. For GraphQL-first builds, see GraphQL API development.

Do you provide API integration consultants, or only full-time developers?

Both, from the same people. The part-time plan, 20 hours a week at $1,499 a month, suits advisory work: reviewing an integration architecture, finding out why a sync keeps failing, choosing between building a connector and buying middleware, or writing the spec a partner will build against. Full-time at $2,799 a month suits ownership, when someone needs to be in the alerts and fix things the same day.

Advice alone tends to end as a document; our consultants also commit the fixes, in your repository. You can start part-time and move to full-time when a partner launch lands, on the same month-to-month terms.

How do I hire an API developer, and what should I test for?

Test failure handling, not syntax. Ask the candidate to walk through an integration that broke in production: what failed, how they found out, and what they changed so it could not fail quietly again. Ask how they would stop a retried webhook from creating a duplicate order, and where they would keep an API key. Good answers mention idempotency keys, dead-letter queues, alerts on zero volume and a secrets manager.

Through Miracuves, every candidate has already done this in a live exercise with injected timeouts and duplicate events, plus a paid trial. You interview the shortlist yourself, most developers start within 48 hours of agreement, and a replacement within the first two weeks costs nothing.