Hire a Django REST Framework Developer
Hire a Django REST Framework (DRF) developer for production REST APIs — serializers, viewsets, auth, versioning, pagination, and query performance. Remote, senior, ex-CTO.
Need to hire a Django REST Framework developer to build an API other teams can actually depend on? That’s most of what I do. I’m Kuldeep Pisda — a senior backend engineer and former startup CTO in Bengaluru who has shipped DRF APIs powering web apps, mobile clients, and third-party integrations for 6+ years, remote, with teams across the world.
What I build with DRF
- Clean serializers — nested writes, validation that lives in one place, and sparse-fieldset patterns so a mobile client and a dashboard can hit the same endpoint without over-fetching.
- Viewsets and routers that stay readable — the right mix of generic views,
mixins, and plain
APIViewwhere the generics stop helping, not a wall of copy-pasted CRUD. - Auth and permissions — token/JWT/session auth, Keycloak and SSO integrations, and object-level permissions that don’t leak one tenant’s data into another’s response.
- Versioning without breakage — evolving an API while the clients already in production keep working.
- Throttling, pagination, and filtering — cursor pagination for large sets, sane rate limits, and filter backends that map to real indexes.
- Self-documenting APIs — OpenAPI/Swagger schemas generated from the code so the docs never drift from reality.
Performance is part of the job
A DRF endpoint is only as fast as the queries behind it. I profile with
select_related/prefetch_related, kill the N+1 storms hiding inside a
SerializerMethodField, and read the actual query plan — I’ve taken a hot endpoint
from ~30 seconds to roughly 200ms by fixing the query, not bolting a cache onto a bad
one. The case studies walk through the before and after.
How engagements work
Well-scoped work with a written plan and testable milestones: a greenfield API, a refactor of one that’s grown unwieldy, or a few hours reviewing serializer and permission design. Remote-first, async-friendly, IST, comfortable overlapping US and EU hours.
FAQ
Can you work on an existing DRF codebase? Yes — a lot of my work is untangling APIs that grew fast: fat serializers, permission logic scattered across views, and endpoints that got slow.
Do you build the frontend too? I focus on the API and the PostgreSQL behind it, and design endpoints around what the client actually needs. I work well alongside frontend teams.
Can you version our API without breaking clients? Yes — that’s a common reason people call. I’ll design a migration path that keeps existing clients working while the new shape rolls out.
Do you write tests? Yes — pytest and factory_boy, TDD where it earns its keep. I’m a DjangoCon and EuroPython speaker on testing Django.
DRF, async views, or Django Ninja? I’ll advise on when async or Django Ninja is worth it versus staying on classic DRF — it depends on your workload, and I’ll be honest about the trade-off.
Let’s talk
Tell me about the API you’re building — get in touch, or grab a time below:
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