Backend developer English
English for Backend Developers: APIs, Databases and Architecture in English
September 12, 2026
A bilingual glossary of backend vocabulary. API design, database concepts, system architecture, and phrases for technical discussions.
1. API Vocabulary
These are the terms you encounter in API design discussions, code reviews, and documentation. Many of them (endpoint, webhook, payload) are used in English even in Spanish-speaking teams.
| Term | Spanish | Example |
|---|---|---|
| endpoint | endpoint / punto de acceso | The /users endpoint returns a paginated list of users. |
| payload | payload / carga útil | The request payload must include the user ID and action. |
| rate limiting | limitación de velocidad / rate limiting | We added rate limiting to prevent abuse of the public API. |
| idempotent | idempotente | PUT requests should be idempotent: calling them twice has the same result as calling them once. |
| pagination | paginación | Use cursor-based pagination for large datasets; offset pagination doesn't scale well. |
| webhook | webhook | The payment provider sends a webhook when a transaction is complete. |
| polling | polling / sondeo | We replaced polling with a WebSocket connection to reduce server load. |
| authentication | autenticación | Authentication verifies who you are. |
| authorization | autorización | Authorization verifies what you are allowed to do. |
| versioning | versionado | We use URL versioning: /api/v1/ and /api/v2/ run in parallel. |
2. Database Vocabulary
Database terms in English are used universally in the tech industry. Knowing them helps you read documentation, understand error messages, and participate in system design discussions.
| Term | Spanish | Example |
|---|---|---|
| schema | esquema | Update the database schema to add the new column. |
| migration | migración | Run the migration before deploying to production. |
| index | índice | Add an index on the email column to speed up lookups. |
| query plan | plan de consulta / plan de ejecución | Check the query plan to understand why this query is slow. |
| transaction | transacción | Wrap both operations in a transaction so they succeed or fail together. |
| ACID | ACID (Atomicidad, Consistencia, Aislamiento, Durabilidad) | Relational databases provide ACID guarantees. |
| deadlock | deadlock / bloqueo mutuo | Two transactions caused a deadlock by locking resources in opposite order. |
| N+1 problem | problema N+1 | Use eager loading to avoid the N+1 problem when fetching related records. |
| connection pooling | pool de conexiones | Configure connection pooling to avoid opening a new database connection for every request. |
| rollback | rollback / reversión | The transaction was rolled back because the second operation failed. |
3. Architecture Vocabulary
System architecture concepts are almost always discussed in English. These terms appear in design documents, architecture decision records (ADRs), and technical interviews.
| Term | Spanish | Example |
|---|---|---|
| monolith | monolito | We started with a monolith and extracted services as we scaled. |
| microservice | microservicio | The payments team owns the payments microservice. |
| message queue | cola de mensajes | Use a message queue to decouple the order service from the notification service. |
| pub/sub | publicación/suscripción (pub/sub) | The event bus uses a pub/sub model: producers publish events, consumers subscribe to them. |
| circuit breaker | circuit breaker / disyuntor | Add a circuit breaker to stop calling a failing downstream service. |
| eventual consistency | consistencia eventual | In a distributed system, you often trade strong consistency for eventual consistency. |
| load balancer | balanceador de carga | The load balancer distributes requests across three backend instances. |
| horizontal scaling | escalado horizontal | Horizontal scaling adds more servers; vertical scaling adds more power to existing servers. |
| retry with backoff | reintentos con retroceso exponencial | Implement retry with exponential backoff to handle transient failures. |
| CAP theorem | teorema CAP | The CAP theorem says you can only have two of: Consistency, Availability, Partition tolerance. |
4. Phrases for Technical Discussions
These are real sentences backend developers use in meetings, design reviews, and pull request comments. Practice saying them out loud.
“We went with X because the trade-off on Y was acceptable.”
Explain an architectural decision and its trade-offs.
“This doesn't scale horizontally because the state is stored in memory.”
Identify a scalability constraint in a system.
“The bottleneck is the database layer.”
Point out where a system's performance constraint is.
“We need to decouple these services.”
Propose separating tightly coupled services to improve maintainability.
“Let's add an abstraction layer here.”
Suggest adding an interface or wrapper to reduce direct dependencies.
“What's the expected read-to-write ratio?”
Ask about usage patterns before designing a database or caching strategy.
“We should handle this failure gracefully.”
Propose adding error handling for a potential point of failure.
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Written by
Roxana LafuenteLingua-e's founder
Roxana Lafuente is a software engineer with 8+ years of experience. At the beginning of her career, even though she had already passed the First Certificate in English, she still froze every time she had to speak up in the daily standup. That was a gap nobody was fixing. After 2,000+ standups, she figured out what actually builds fluency: practice that looks like your real work. She built Lingua-e so other developers wouldn't have to take the long road to feel confident working in an international development environment.