Communication Platform API

A communications company was losing enterprise deals because prospects asked two questions in every security review, 'what's your test coverage?' and 'how do you deploy?', and the honest answers were '12%' and 'we SSH in'. The existing API had no versioning, poor documentation, and deployments that took down production on a monthly cadence. Their sales cycle had slowed to a crawl.

We rebuilt the API from scratch with Django REST Framework, locking down clean endpoint design with explicit versioning (v1 lives forever, v2 breaks changes), pagination on every list endpoint, and rate limiting enforced at the framework level. We wrote tests as we built, covering unit, integration, and contract, reaching 95% coverage with 800+ test cases before any endpoint went to production. CI/CD runs on GitHub Actions: every PR runs lint, tests, security scans, and a type check. Deployment is automated, staged, and rolls back automatically if the error rate spikes post-deploy.

• 95% test coverage across 800+ automated tests (unit, integration, contract)
• Zero production outages in the 12 months since the rebuild went live
• API p95 response time of 45ms under peak load; 99.99% success rate
• Enterprise sales cycle shortened by 6 weeks once 'test coverage' stopped being a red flag

DRF over FastAPI because the team inherited Django elsewhere in the stack and we valued single-framework ops over the marginal speed win. Versioning is done at the URL level (not header-based) because URL versioning is easier to debug when customers call your support team. CI/CD enforces coverage as a merge gate: any PR that drops coverage below 90% is blocked, which keeps the team honest without requiring constant human review.