> Markdown alternate of https://steerscale.com/services/backend-distributed-systems

SVC-02 · Backend & Distributed Systems

# Distributed systems that behave predictably under real load.

APIs, event-driven architectures and high-throughput services, built and operated by an engineer who has run them at 16 million concurrent users and 80K writes per second.

[Discuss your system](https://steerscale.com/contact)

\[Figure: Illustrative throughput and latency profile for a write-heavy API under a load test: p50 12 ms, p95 41 ms, p99 88 ms at 80,000 writes per second, error rate 0.01%.\]

Capabilities

## Backend engineering for systems with real traffic.

-   01
    
    ### APIs & services
    
    Java, Kotlin and Scala services on Spring, WebFlux, Quarkus and Akka. Contracts, versioning, backpressure and idempotency handled deliberately.
    
-   02
    
    ### Event-driven architecture
    
    Kafka topics, partitions, ordering guarantees, consumer groups, exactly-once semantics where they are worth their cost.
    
-   03
    
    ### Data stores under load
    
    Cassandra, Redis, PostgreSQL, Couchbase and DynamoDB — data modelling for the access pattern, not the ORM.
    
-   04
    
    ### Concurrency & throughput
    
    Thread and connection pools, queue depth, timeouts, circuit breakers and retry budgets sized from measurements.
    
-   05
    
    ### Failure domains
    
    Bulkheads, graceful degradation, multi-region behaviour and recovery paths tested before an incident tests them for you.
    
-   06
    
    ### Performance engineering
    
    Load tests, profiling, GC tuning and capacity models, with results your team can rerun.
    

Working stack

## What we reach for, day to day.

Model calls increasingly live inside these systems. That is why the [AI Systems Audit](https://steerscale.com/services/ai-systems-audit) looks at queues, state and concurrency alongside prompts and models.

LANGUAGES

Java · Kotlin · Scala · Python · TypeScript

FRAMEWORKS

Spring Boot · WebFlux · Quarkus · Akka · FastAPI

MESSAGING

Kafka · RabbitMQ · REST · WebSocket

DATA

Cassandra · Couchbase · PostgreSQL · Redis · DynamoDB · Elasticsearch

## Have a service that behaves differently at 10× load?

Short engagements, written proposals, real code in your repository.

[Discuss your system](https://steerscale.com/contact)