Backend Development - Scalable APIs & Systems

A great backend is invisible to users but essential for everything they do. It handles data, enforces business rules, and keeps your application secure. At PXL, we build backends that do all this reliably, day after day.

We do not just make things work. We build systems that are easy to maintain, test, and extend. Our backends are designed for the real world, where requirements change and traffic grows.

For Norwegian businesses, backend development is largely about making systems talk to each other. An isolated application has little value. The value emerges when the online store communicates automatically with the accounting system, or when the customer portal pulls data directly from Altinn.

PXL has deep experience with what we call "The Big Four" in Norwegian digital infrastructure:

Setting up Vipps to accept payments is straightforward. The hard part is handling everything that happens around the payment. We build robust integrations against the Vipps eCom and Recurring APIs that handle abandoned purchases, refunds, and partial charges. We ensure webhooks from Vipps update your stock balance in real time and that the accounting reconciles down to the last krone.

If you need to handle sensitive data or sign contracts digitally, we implement BankID with OIDC (OpenID Connect) for secure authentication and PAdES for legally binding signatures. We know the pitfalls around session management and privacy, and we ensure the solution meets the required trust level -- "Substantial" or "High" -- depending on your needs.

Norway is modernising, and Altinn 3.0 is the new standard for dialogue with government agencies. We help businesses automate reporting or retrieve data via Maskinporten. This saves your employees thousands of hours of manual work. We can set up systems that automatically instantiate forms, prefill them, and submit them for signing.

The accounting system is the company's source of truth. We integrate your custom software directly with systems like Tripletex or PowerOffice. This eliminates double entry. When an order is completed in your domain system, the invoice is created automatically in accounting. We know how to handle API rate limits and large data volumes efficiently, so the system does not buckle at month-end.

In the backend world, new frameworks appear every week. We navigate this landscape with a pragmatic approach. We choose technology that is mature, widely adopted, and makes it easy to find competence five years from now.

For many Norwegian businesses, time-to-market is critical. Here, the Laravel framework is often unbeatable. It gives us ready-made building blocks for everything from authentication and queue systems to database management. It lets us build advanced, secure business applications in half the time it takes in heavier languages. There is a reason Laravel is one of the most-used web application frameworks in the world: it is built to deliver value fast.

When the system needs to process large datasets, run heavy computations, or integrate artificial intelligence, Python is the natural choice. Python is the language for AI. Using frameworks like Django or FastAPI, we can build lightning-fast APIs that connect your company's data directly to machine learning models.

Regardless of language, the database is the heart of the system. We prefer PostgreSQL. It is not just a database; it is a platform that handles everything from standard relational tables to JSON documents (NoSQL) and geographic data (GIS). By leveraging the power of the database properly, we can simplify application code significantly, resulting in fewer bugs and faster systems.

In Norway, security is not "nice to have" -- it is a legal requirement. With GDPR and increasingly strict enforcement from the Norwegian Data Protection Authority, we build all systems following the principle of Privacy by Design.

This means we:

1. Minimise data: We never store more than necessary.
2. Control access: We implement strict role-based access control (RBAC). A case worker should not see administrator data.
3. Encrypt everything: Data is encrypted both at rest in the database and in transit over the network.
4. Log responsibly: We log who does what, without logging sensitive personal data. This ensures traceability during incidents.

We follow the Norwegian National Security Authority's (NSM) fundamental principles for ICT security during the development phase. That gives you confidence that the solution not only works, but withstands an evolving threat landscape.

Many established businesses sit on legacy systems that are critical for operations but expensive to maintain and difficult to change. Replacing everything at once is often a recipe for disaster.

We frequently recommend a strategy based on the Strangler Fig pattern. That means building new, modern modules alongside the old system. We move functionality piece by piece -- invoicing first, then order processing, then customer registry.

Over time the old system is "strangled" while the new one takes over. This dramatically reduces risk. You get value from the first delivery, and you do not have to hold your breath for two years while waiting for a brand-new monolithic replacement.

A backend developer at PXL is not someone who sits in a basement taking orders. We are proactive problem solvers. We challenge you on the requirements. If we see that a process can be solved more simply, we speak up.

We document what we build. We write automated tests. We build systems that can be handed off to others, because we believe the best way to retain clients is to do such good work that they want to stay, not that they have to stay because the code is incomprehensible.

Whether you need to build a next-generation SaaS platform, integrate with Altinn, or just need someone to sort out a sluggish database -- talk to us. We speak your language, whether that is PHP, Python, or plain English.