How to hire a Django developer: skills, interview questions and costs
Django has been around since 2005, so there are many developers who list it on their CV. Telling a capable one from someone who followed a tutorial takes a little preparation. Below you will find what to test, what to ask, what affects the price and how to get a new developer productive. If you also need APIs in other languages, see our back-end developers and API developers.
What a Django developer works on
Django is a Python framework for building web applications. It handles the plumbing every app needs: routing, database access, user accounts, forms and an admin area. That lets a developer spend their time on your actual product. Typical projects are SaaS products, marketplaces, booking and membership sites, internal dashboards, and the API behind a React or mobile front end.
Because Django is written in Python, it sits close to the tools data teams already use. A Django app can run reports with pandas, call a machine learning model or share code with your data scripts, all in the same language.
What to test
- Data modeling: sensible models and relations, and migrations that will not lock a busy table.
- Query sense: spotting the extra queries in a list page and fixing them with select_related, prefetch_related or annotations.
- APIs: Django REST Framework serializers, permissions and versioning.
- Security: CSRF protection, permission checks on every view, safe file uploads and settings kept out of the code.
- Background work: Celery tasks that can safely run twice, with retries and timeouts.
- Testing and deployment: pytest, factories, CI and a repeatable way to release.
Questions worth asking
- A list page is slow and the debug toolbar shows hundreds of queries. What do you do?
- How would you add a new required field to a table with millions of rows without downtime?
- When would you reach for a class-based view, and when for a plain function?
- How do you stop a user from seeing another customer’s records through the API?
- Describe a Django upgrade you led. What broke, and how did you find it?
Good answers come with specifics: query counts, the tools they used, a migration plan in steps. Be wary of answers that stay general or lean on “it depends” without saying what it depends on.
Example job post
Something this short is enough: “We are looking for a Django developer to grow the booking platform behind our website and mobile app. You will build features in Django and Django REST Framework, design PostgreSQL models, write Celery jobs for reminders and reports, and add tests with pytest. You will work with a front-end developer and our product owner. Must have: Django in production, DRF and PostgreSQL. Nice to have: Wagtail, Docker and AWS.” Our software engineer job description template has a longer version you can adapt.
What changes the price
The level of the developer moves the price most. Someone who can design the whole data model and lead an upgrade charges more than someone who adds pages to an existing app. Where they live comes second, with the US and Western Europe at the top of the range. Then come the hours you need and any specialist areas, such as payments, large data volumes or real-time features. At DigiWorks the developer’s pay and our fee are shown separately.
A paid trial task
For your last one or two candidates, set a short paid task drawn from your own app. For a Django role, that might be a small model with an admin screen and an API endpoint, plus tests. Keep it to half a day at most and give everyone the same brief. Read the pull request for clear models, sensible names and tests that check real behavior.
Freelance or dedicated
Freelance help works for an isolated fix or a small integration. When the app is central to your business and keeps changing, a dedicated developer is usually the better deal, because they keep the context of past decisions, data quirks and incidents.
The first three months
Week one: repository, staging server and error tracker access, a local setup that works, and one small ticket shipped. Month one: ownership of one app inside the project, with its tests and its part of the admin. Month three: your developer plans work with you, reviews pull requests and flags the parts of the codebase that need attention, such as an overdue upgrade.
Mistakes to avoid
- Putting heavy work such as imports or PDF reports inside a web request instead of a background job.
- Running with debug mode on or secrets committed to the repository.
- Staying on a Django version that no longer gets security fixes.
- Judging candidates on how many packages they know instead of how well they use the framework itself.
Planning a bigger remote team? Our remote software engineering hiring playbook covers the wider picture.