Senior API development talent and rates in Recruitment & HR Tech
Senior API development engineers serving recruitment & hr tech run roughly $115–$170/hr. Stack realities for this combination: Workday + Greenhouse + LinkedIn API + Checkr + HiBob — common integrations: Workday + Greenhouse + Lever ATS, LinkedIn Talent Solutions API, Checkr + Sterling background checks. Application screening; interview scheduling; offer-letter generation
What API development actually requires in 2026
2026 stack: OpenAPI 3.1 spec-first design, Stoplight or Postman for design + docs, NestJS or Hono or FastAPI for implementation, Kong/AWS API Gateway/Apigee for management, Zuplo for AI-friendly modern APIs. tRPC and gRPC for internal RPC. GraphQL via Apollo or Yoga. Senior API engineers design for backwards compatibility, version negotiation, idempotency, and deprecation policies. Junior engineers ship endpoints that work and discover API design problems on every breaking change. The 2026 rule: spec-first or pay later.