API Architect Lead API Engineer

Experience: 10 Years

Job Description

We are seeking a highly experienced Senior API Architect / Lead API Engineer to drive the design governance and lifecycle management of enterprisescale APIs. This role focuses on defining and enforcing API standards improving developer experience and collaborating across product engineering and architecture teams to deliver scalable secure and highperformance APIs.

The ideal candidate brings deep expertise in REST gRPC and eventdriven API design strong documentation practices and handson experience with modern microservices architectures.

Key Responsibilities

API Design & Architecture

• Design RESTful gRPC and eventdriven APIs using industry best practices and standards
• Create API specifications using OpenAPI/Swagger AsyncAPI RAML and related frameworks
• Define API patterns to support scalability reliability performance and backward compatibility

Documentation & Developer Experience

• Create and maintain clear comprehensive API documentation and usage guides
• Advocate for excellent developer experience including:
  • Versioning strategies
  • Error handling standards
  • API discoverability and usability

Governance & Standards

• Define and enforce API design standards style guides and governance processes
• Ensure consistency and quality across all APIs within the enterprise
• Support full API lifecycle management including versioning deprecation and backward compatibility

Collaboration & Prototyping

• Partner with Product Engineering QA and Architecture teams to gather requirements and translate them into API designs
• Build API prototypes and mock servers to validate designs and collect early feedback

Quality Security & Reliability

• Collaborate with QA and development teams to ensure APIs are welltested secure and performant
• Apply API security best practices including OAuth2 JWT API keys and access controls
• Promote reliability observability and testing standards across API platforms

Continuous Improvement

• Stay current with API trends tools and technologies
• Drive continuous improvements in API design tooling and governance processes

Required Skills & Qualifications

• Formal training or certification in software engineering with 10 years of handson experience
• Deep understanding of:
  • RESTful APIs
  • gRPC
  • Eventdriven architectures
• Strong proficiency with API specification and tooling:
  • OpenAPI / Swagger
  • AsyncAPI
  • RAML
  • Postman
• Experience with API gateways API management platforms and developer portals
• Excellent communication collaboration and documentation skills
• Strong understanding of API security best practices
• Experience working in Agile / Scrum environments
• Solid background in microservices architectures

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with AWS including EKS
• Knowledge of DomainDriven Design (DDD) and microservicesbased systems
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines and automated API testing
• Familiarity with Javabased API platforms
• Contributions to opensource API tools frameworks or standards

Essential Skills

• API Design & Governance
• REST / gRPC / EventDriven APIs
• OpenAPI / Swagger / AsyncAPI
• Microservices Architecture
• API Security (OAuth2 JWT)
• AWS & Cloudnative environments
• CI/CD integration for APIs