Finding the Best Microservices Team: Insider Tips

Microservices have been a viable alternative to traditional monolithic architecture for a while now. With a new structure that provides reliable flexibility, businesses increasingly seek microservices developers. However, picking just any candidate isn’t a good move, as you won’t get the full benefits of microservices and risk compromising the quality of your product.

As a company built around transforming classic setups into more powerful and scalable architecture, Serverless is excited about using microservices. So today, we will help you find the best professionals in microservices development from the global talent pool. We’ll discuss where to look for microservices developers, their core skills, and why your business needs them.

One of the easiest approaches is to outsource microservices development, letting a professional team do the work for you. This way, you have on-demand specialists to implement microservices and maintain your architecture, without having to hire in-house staff. That ultimately saves money while giving you the production capabilities that you seek. So, how to approach outsourcing?

Pick a Destination

We’ll talk about the cost of microservices coders for hire a bit below. For now, suffice it to say it varies quite heavily based on the region. Moreover, there’s a baseline level of skill that’s traditionally associated with certain destinations. For example, North American specialists are known to be the priciest yet quite skillful, while those from Southeast Asia are considered cheap but less effective.

Verify Expertise

Make sure you can see a pattern of quality case studies from any vendor you consider when you hire microservices experts. Ideally, these cases have to be similar to the project you have planned. That way, you will know that not only are you hiring professionals, but they will know exactly how to approach the work.

Flexible Tech Background

Your microservices developers should be able to adapt to any change in the project, which means they need to have a solid knowledge base. We’re not just talking about microservices design patterns, though, ideally your team members would be familiar with:

• RESTful services
• Event-driven development
• Agile methodologies
• DDD principles

All of these will help your employees navigate challenges that arise during development. As a result, you can build more ambitious projects with minimal risk.

Now, as we said, technical knowledge is essential – that’s a given. However, a microservices development team for hire should also have excellent soft skills to be worthy of your time. Being able to communicate well, learn new technologies, and mesh well with your employees will guarantee that you can cooperate with this team long-term.

It’s important to clarify how your candidates approach problem-solving and what they expect from working with you. From things like status reports to the chain of command, you should establish all the “social” details early on.

As for the tech side of things, when you hire microservices experts, there’s an array of skills worth their weight in gold. For example, the DevOps skillset is essential, and, in fact, so is their familiarity with serverless architecture. Being an expert in cloud platforms, databases, and queuing is the kind of thing that will push a developer from a good one to a great one.

Microservices devs must also be specialized in a variety of markets. eCommerce and healthcare are leading in terms of microservices use. However, a good dev would be able to navigate a project even in the more niche sectors.

The name of the job speaks for itself, as the core role of a microservices dev is to create, well, microservices. These independent service networks, connected through APIs, will be the foundation of your system. Thus, there’s a big responsibility on a dev’s shoulders, especially in terms of maintenance.

Your microservices developers will need to maintain data consistency and reinforce the system to have high fault tolerance. They’re responsible not just for their own code but for the way your product runs in general. To that end, a dev must be skilled at API documentation in addition to design.

There are just a few steps to hiring your microservices team, which should be familiar to any company. We’ll go through them in this section in the form of a small guide:

• Craft a job description
• Reach out to recruit
• Interview and evaluate thoroughly

Craft a Job Description

You need to create an offer that attracts the top talent in the industry. The offer has to be competitive in terms of compensation, responsibilities, and benefits. Plus, you must clearly outline aspects of the job, highlighting potential problem areas. An honest and thorough description helps professionals determine if they want to spend their time applying.

Recruitment Efforts

Make sure your recruiters are being proactive in hiring microservices programmers - reach out to worthy candidates and contact vendors. While a company with a good reputation and a lucrative offer may attract professionals with no extra effort, taking the initiative is better. Keep your recruiters informed about the specifics of the job, so they can connect to candidates on a deeper level.

Interview and Evaluation

Get to know the candidates or vendors on your shortlist with a unified interview structure for them all. This way you can easily cross-reference their answers and understand who has shown a better grasp of the technology. Plus, remember to check prior experience and verify any cases listed on their application. Compare them to your own project to see if that expertise will be valuable to you.

In this section, we’ll share the most popular platforms where you can find microservices devs. These are great if you’re looking for a short-term contract with a freelance developer or team.

Toptal

If you’re looking to hire AWS architect, Toptal has one decisive advantage: thorough verification. The platform has a five-stage approach to confirming the quality of a candidate. That results in just a select few being presented to companies. Even with that sort of thorough vetting, the site offers a two-week trial period to make sure your chosen candidate is a good fit.

Upwork

This is the most well-known site to hire freelance microservices developers. However, Upwork also has a bit of a dubious reputation when it comes to talent. While it’s possible to find some truly masterful devs here, there are tons of candidates to sift through. That can sometimes result in companies picking the first viable candidate and being disappointed.

In our personal experience, Upwork isn’t a wrong choice. Yet, it requires careful consideration. Remember to do your own vetting on candidates and ensure they are as skilled as they say. Then, you can really have a fruitful collaboration.

Turing

Combining the best parts of its competitors, Turing is a worthy platform for your search. Its vetting isn’t as quality as Toptal but it does offer a similar two-week trial. That way you can verify your compatibility with a candidate. Plus, even if you end up wanting a second option, the site provides a rather huge base of developers.

One great feature is the ability to filter out candidates by scheduling. This way you will always spend time on negotiations with a dev who is in a starkly different time zone. Having at least a bit of overlap is important to make sure you’re communicating well and relaying tasks and concerns promptly.

Now that you know how to hire microservices developers and which platforms can serve that purpose, let’s talk about the cost. The average salary for a microservices dev varies based on a variety of factors but chief among them is their location. Certain regions have much cheaper rates, while others may be a bit too pricey for some companies’ liking.

Here are the approximate rates for various regions, just to give you an idea of the market. While it’s going to keep growing massively to a predicted $7.2 billion, these are the relevant numbers for now:

As you can see, North America is the priciest option, though it is also known for having highly skilled developers. Western Europe and the United Kingdom are almost tied and offer about the same level of quality. However, it’s important to remember that certain countries may be preferable based on their time zone.

For now, the most balanced level of cost versus quality is coming from Eastern Europe. Countries like Poland, Ukraine, and Lithuania offer strong talent while setting a competitive price for their services.

Now, since you’re looking to hire microservices developers, we’d be wrong to omit ourselves as an optimal candidate. Serverless has been in the market for over a decade, creating custom software, enhancing other companies’ teams, and rebuilding systems from scratch.

As a custom development provider, we’ve worked on moving platforms from monolithic architecture to microservices. One such case is MasterStream, where we redesigned and automated this telecom business system. The Serverless team implemented RESTful APIs on a Lambda backend, using Amazon SQS for asynchronous processing.

Similarly, we added microservices to an ELT platform, which people can use to extract analytical data from third-party sources. We redesigned the slow monolithic architecture to a faster microservices infrastructure while enhancing the database for a further speed boost. Our team also crafted a user-friendly web application to make the platform more usable.

There’s plenty of talent in the market when it comes to microservices. In this guide, we’ve shared how to choose the right professionals, where to look for them, and what sort of rates you can expect. With these insights from the Serverless team, you can hire top microservices developers by scouring the market.

Of course, it’s not entirely necessary to spend weeks trying to find the perfect candidate on freelancer platforms. Instead, you could turn to Serverless - a team of specialists that knows the industry from the inside. We’ve worked on many microservices projects and will happily bring our renowned quality and professionalism to you.

To skip the wait and get the work started, get in touch with Serverless today.