Hire a Django Consultant

When you hire a Django consultant, you’re not buying more hands on the keyboard — you’re buying judgment. I’m Kuldeep Pisda, a senior backend engineer and former startup CTO based in Bengaluru, and I get pulled in when a team needs a decision de-risked: is this architecture going to hold, why is the database melting under load, is a rewrite actually necessary, and how do we raise the engineering bar without stalling delivery. Six-plus years of building and running production Django systems means I’ve usually already made the mistake you’re about to make, and can tell you which direction to walk.

What I consult on#

• Architecture review — a hard read of how your Django/DRF app is put together: app boundaries, the ORM layer, where coupling will bite you, and the decisions that are cheap to change now and expensive to change in a year.
• Performance audit — I work from EXPLAIN ANALYZE and query plans, not guesswork. I find the N+1s, the missing indexes, the sequential scans, and the serializer hot paths, then hand you a ranked list of what to fix and what it’s worth.
• Scaling strategy — where the current design tops out and why: connection pooling, read replicas, Celery queue design, caching layers, and the “this works now, hits a wall at 10x because Y” conversation before you hit the wall.
• Migration strategy — framework and platform moves without a big-bang rewrite. Strangler-fig planning, cutover sequencing, and how to keep shipping while you migrate.
• Standards and code-review culture — the boring things that compound: review norms, testing discipline, ORM patterns, multi-tenant data-isolation checks, and what a senior second opinion catches that a linter never will.

Experience you’re hiring#

I’ve scaled a Django platform past 30,000 users on a non-profit budget, so I’ve seen where systems actually bend under real traffic rather than in theory. On the performance side, I’ve turned 30-second endpoints into ~200ms ones — the kind of win that comes from query plans and indexes, not from throwing servers at it. I migrated a headless-CMS product onto Django using a strangler-fig approach, no big-bang rewrite, keeping the product live throughout. I also wrote django-rls, a PostgreSQL row-level-security library for multi-tenant isolation, which is exactly the sort of decision I help teams get right the first time. The case studies walk through the real trade-offs. My working stack is Django/DRF, PostgreSQL (including pgvector), Celery, and AWS, and I’ve owned SOC 2 compliance end to end. I speak at DjangoCon US, DjangoCon Europe, and EuroPython, so a fair amount of what I consult on is material I’ve already had to defend on a stage.

How engagements work#

Consulting is lighter-weight than a build. Most engagements start as a fixed-scope audit — I read the code and the data, run the plans, and deliver a written findings document with prioritized recommendations, usually inside a week. From there it’s whatever fits: a few hours for a focused architecture review or a second opinion on a specific decision, or an ongoing retainer where I’m the senior hand your team can pull into design discussions and thorny reviews without hiring a full-time principal. Remote-first, async-friendly, based in India (IST), and used to overlapping with US and EU hours when a call matters.

FAQ#

What does a Django consultant actually do? Advises rather than builds. I review architecture, audit performance and scaling, plan migrations, and give senior second opinions — so your team makes fewer expensive, hard-to-reverse decisions.

How is a consultant different from a Django developer? A developer ships features; a consultant de-risks the decisions around them. If you need code written, hire a Django developer. If you need to know whether the plan is sound before you commit six months to it, that’s this.

What does it cost? A second opinion — one 90-minute call on a specific decision, with a written recommendation within 48 hours — is $500. An architecture or performance audit is $4,000: written findings with ranked fixes in 7 calendar days plus a 60-minute walkthrough call, and the fee credits toward any retainer or build started within 60 days. Ongoing advisory runs $2,000/month — two 60-minute calls plus async review of up to 4 design docs or PRs. All prices in USD plus GST where applicable, and you’ll have the cost in writing before we start.

Do you consult for international and remote teams? Yes — I work remotely with clients in the US, EU, and India, on IST, and structure hours to overlap when it matters. Consulting is location-agnostic by nature.

One-off audit or ongoing advisory? Both, and one often leads to the other. Many teams start with a single audit to get the lay of the land, then keep me on retainer for the design calls and reviews that follow.

Let’s talk#

Tell me what decision you’re trying to de-risk — get in touch, or grab a time below:

Other ways to work with me#

Django & Python: Django Developer in India · Remote Django Developer · Django REST Framework Developer · Python Consultant · Python Developer in India · Backend Engineer in India

PostgreSQL & data: PostgreSQL Expert · PostgreSQL Performance Consultant

AI & LLM: AI Engineer in India · LLM Engineer · RAG Engineer

Leadership: Fractional CTO in India · Fractional CTO for Startups · Startup Technical Advisor · Technical Co-founder for Startups