01Owns
Models and the ORM
Shapes models, managers and querysets so views fetch what they need in one or two queries, using select_related, prefetch_related and annotations instead of Python loops.
Hire · Backend
Hire Django Developers
Senior Django developers who sit inside your engineering team and look after an established Django codebase: models, migrations, the admin, DRF endpoints and the Celery workers behind them. Before any introduction, each candidate has untangled a slow queryset and a risky migration in a paid exercise.
Paid exercise on a real Django project
Senior, lead and staff levels only
Joins your sprints, repo and code review
On your team
What a Django developer owns on your team.
02Owns
Migrations that deploy cleanly
Writes schema and data migrations that run on large tables without long locks, splits risky changes across releases and resolves conflicting migration graphs between branches.
03Owns
The admin as an internal tool
Turns the Django admin into something operations staff can rely on: list filters, search, readonly fields, custom actions and permission checks that match real roles.
04Owns
DRF endpoints
Builds serializers, viewsets and permission classes in Django REST Framework, with throttling, pagination and filtering that stay consistent across the API.
05Owns
Celery and periodic work
Runs Celery workers and beat schedules alongside Django, passing IDs rather than model instances to tasks and committing transactions before work is queued.
Where Django projects actually hurt
Django makes the first year easy. The pain arrives later, as views that quietly run a query per row, migrations nobody dares to deploy on a weekday, and signals that send emails from inside half-finished transactions. When you interview, ask candidates which of these they have cleaned up and what they changed in the team’s habits afterwards.
Good Django engineers talk about query counts the way front-end people talk about bundle size. They will mention assertNumQueries, prefetch_related with Prefetch objects, and the moment they decided an annotation was clearer than a loop.
Vetting
Skills we test before a Django developer joins.
01Tested
Queryset fluency
Reads the SQL Django generates, uses django-debug-toolbar or query logging to count queries, and knows when Subquery, F expressions or a raw query is justified.
02Tested
Migration safety
Understands RunPython, separate database and state operations, and how to add a non-null column to a busy table without downtime.
03Tested
Signals used sparingly
Knows signals hide control flow, prefers explicit service functions, and uses transaction.on_commit when side effects must wait for the write.
04Tested
Settings per environment
Splits settings for local, staging and production, reads secrets from the environment and keeps DEBUG, ALLOWED_HOSTS and security middleware correct in each.
05Tested
Upgrades across LTS releases
Clears deprecation warnings release by release, checks third-party app compatibility and moves a project from one long-term support version to the next.
06Tested
Testing Django code
pytest-django or the built-in test runner, factories instead of fixtures files, and assertNumQueries to stop query counts creeping back up.
Work sample
How the Django developer work sample runs.
- 01Step 1
Cut the query count on a list view
The candidate receives a DRF list endpoint that issues hundreds of queries per page, brings it down to a handful and proves it with assertNumQueries.
- 02Step 2
Ship a migration on a large table
They add a required field to a table seeded with a large volume of rows, planning the change across releases so nothing locks during deployment. We pay for the hours.
- 03Step 3
Move logic out of a signal
A post_save signal sends emails before the transaction commits; they refactor it into an explicit function using on_commit and add a test.
- 04Step 4
Explain an upgrade plan
On a short call they describe how they would move the sample project up one Django LTS version, in language a product manager can follow.
An exercise built from real Django failure modes
Our paid exercise uses a small project with deliberate faults: a chatty DRF endpoint, a migration that would lock a large table, and a signal that fires before commit. Candidates fix them and write up why. That reveals more about production judgement than any question about middleware order.
Levels
Django Developers: what changes at each level.
01Level 1
Senior
Delivers models, endpoints and admin changes within your existing app structure and reviews colleagues’ migrations before they merge.
02Level 2
Lead
Decides how apps are split, where business logic lives, how DRF conventions are applied and how migrations are reviewed and released.
03Level 3
Staff Django engineer
Plans major version upgrades, database sharding or read replicas, and the gradual extraction of services from a large Django monolith.
Matching seniority to the codebase
If your apps are well organised and the team agrees where logic lives, a senior engineer slots in. When fat models, fat views and signals all compete as patterns, bring in a lead to settle conventions. A staff engineer is the right call when the question is a multi-version upgrade, splitting the database, or carving services out of the monolith.
Other options
When to hire someone other than a Django developer.
01Consider
Python outside the web layer
If most of the work is pipelines, scripts or ML serving rather than a Django project, a general Python developer is broader.
Open register02Consider
A single small microservice
For one narrow service without an admin or heavy ORM needs, Flask keeps the footprint smaller.
Open register03Consider
You need one owner for UI and backend
When the same person must build templates or a SPA as well as the models, a full-stack hire makes more sense.
Open registerSettling in during the first weeks
Start with a change that includes a migration, so the new hire sees how your releases handle schema changes. Then give them ownership of one Django app end to end, including its admin, tests and Celery tasks.
Ask for a written list of deprecation warnings and slow views they come across. It becomes the backlog for your next upgrade and costs nothing to collect.
FAQ
Questions to resolve before the build.
01Can a Django developer upgrade us from an old Django version?
Yes, and it is one of the most common reasons teams bring one in. The usual path is one release at a time with deprecation warnings turned into errors, third-party packages checked at each step, and the test suite run in CI before each jump.
02Do they work with Django REST Framework and Celery?
Both are part of the vetting. The exercise includes a DRF endpoint with a query-count problem and a side effect that has to wait for the database commit, which is where Celery and signals usually go wrong.
03Is a Django specialist overkill for a mid-sized project?
Not if the project already runs on Django. Someone who knows the ORM, migrations and admin deeply avoids the slow queries and tangled signals that generalists often add while learning the framework.
Works alongside
Roles a Django developer works best alongside.
01Pair with
React developers
When a single-page front end consumes your DRF API and both sides need to agree on serializers and error shapes.
Open register02Pair with
DevOps engineers
For Gunicorn or Uvicorn workers, Celery autoscaling, static file storage and zero-downtime release pipelines.
Open register03Pair with
Data analysts
Reporting often starts as admin exports; an analyst can move it to a proper read replica and dashboards.
Open registerProduct delivery
Need the whole product built instead?
Primary sources
References behind this page
Dated official documentation, standards, and research that support the factual claims on this page.
- 01Django documentation: Migrations
How Django tracks, writes and applies schema and data migrations.
- 02Django REST Framework: Serializers
Official DRF guide to serializers, validation and nested relations.
How to read this page
Scope, cost and timeline figures are planning guidance until confirmed in a written proposal. Diagrams and screens are illustrations, not client deliverables, and source-code rights and handover follow the signed agreement. See the delivery process and the full disclaimer.
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Turn the brief into an accepted product scope.
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