Senior Lead API Engineer

Career Area:

Job Description:

Your Work Shapes the World at Caterpillar Inc.

When you join Caterpillar yourejoining a global team who cares not just about the work we do but also about each other. We are the makers problem solvers and future world builders who are creating stronger more sustainable communities. We dontjust talk about progress and innovation here we make it happen with our customers where we work and live. Together we are building a better world so we can all enjoy living in it.

Your Work Shapes the World at Caterpillar Inc.

Cat Digital is the digital and technology arm of Caterpillar Inc. leveraging the latest technologies to build industry leading digital solutions for our customers and dealers. With over 1.5 million connected assets worldwide our teams use data technology advanced analytics telematics and AI capabilities to help our customers build a better more sustainable world.

Job Summary:

The Senior Lead API Engineer provides technical and product leadership for Caterpillars Parts eCommerce APIs.

This role acts as the technical product owner for one or more API domains owning the technical definition lifecycle quality and evolution of APIs that power customer dealer and partnerfacing digital experiences.
While this role maintains strong handson engineering skills its primary focus is API product strategy governance and enablement ensuring APIs are reliable scalable welldocumented and aligned to business outcomes.

What You Will Do:

As a Lead Software Engineer API Platform & Product Ownership you will contribute to the design governance and evolution of Caterpillars API ecosystem serving as the singlethreaded owner for assigned API products and domains.

API Product Leadership & Ownership

1. Act as the technical product owner for Parts eCommerce APIs owning:
API contracts versioning and lifecycle management
Backlog prioritization and roadmap alignment
API product readiness publishing and deprecation decisions
2. Partner with Product Owners Architects and Business stakeholders to translate business capabilities into welldefined consumercentric APIs.
3. Define and enforce API quality standards including performance security documentation and operational readiness.
4. Represent assigned API domains in architecture reviews API governance forums and crossteam design discussions acting as the authoritative decisionmaker for API design and changes.

Technical Leadership & Engineering Excellence
5. Maintain handson engineering capability contributing code where appropriate including:
API implementations enhancements and refactoring
API proxies and policies (e.g. Apigee API Gateway Azure API Management)
Proofofconcepts for new API patterns or integrations
6. Guide teams in designing RESTful eventdriven and domainaligned APIs ensuring consistency across the eCommerce platform.
7. Drive adoption of best practices for:
OpenAPI specifications and documentation
Backward compatibility and versioning strategies
Error handling rate limiting and resiliency patterns
8. Ensure APIs are observable and operable collaborating with SRE and platform teams on monitoring alerting and incident response.

Delivery Collaboration & Enablement
9. Work independently on complex crosscutting systems and API components used by multiple applications or teams.
10. Collaborate with consuming teams to ensure APIs meet realworld usage needs balancing flexibility with platform stability.
11. Mentor engineers and API consumers on API usage design intent and platform standards.
12. Support integrated testing consumer validation and release readiness activities to ensure highquality API delivery.
13. Participate in oncall and offhours support rotations as needed for critical API products.

The position manages the completion of its own work assignments and coordinates work with multiple teams.
Based on experience and domain knowledge the incumbent works independently with minimal supervision and is trusted to make productlevel API decisions within established governance frameworks.

Typical customers include Caterpillar customers dealers external partners and internal product and engineering teams. The role requires the ability to identify nonobvious problems evaluate tradeoffs and determine the best course of action across technical and business constraints.

What You Will Have:

Decision Making and Critical Thinking: Knowledge of the decision-making process and associated tools and techniques; ability to accurately analyze situations and reach productive decisions based on informed judgment.
Software Development: Knowledge of software development tools and activities; ability to produce software products or systems in line with product requirements.
Software Development Life Cycle: Knowledge of software development life cycle; ability to use a structured methodology for delivering and managing new or enhanced software products to the marketplace.
Software Integration Engineering: Knowledge of software integration processes and functions; ability to design develop and maintain interfaces and linkage to alternative platforms and software packages.
Software Product Design/Architecture: Knowledge of software product design; ability to convert market requirements into the software product design.
Software Product Testing: Knowledge of software product testing; ability to design plan and execute testing strategies and tactics to ensure software product quality and adherence to stated requirements.

Considerations For Top Candidates:

• Position requires a four-year degree from an accredited college or university or equivalent working experience

• Software development experience or at least five years of experience with masters degree in computer science or related field.

• Experience in designing and developing software applications or at least five years of experience in software application development with masters degree in computer science or related field.

• Demonstrated ability to write review and debug productionquality code.

• Experience designing governing or operating AIenabled APIs including APIs that expose orchestrate or integrate with large language models (LLMs) or other AI services.

• Strong understanding of AIdriven API interaction patterns.

• Familiarity with Model Context Protocol (MCP) or similar approaches for standardizing how AI agents and tools discover invoke and exchange context with APIs.

• Understanding of agenttoagent (A2A) interaction patterns including how APIs are designed to safely support autonomous or semiautonomous agents operating across systems.

• Ability to define and enforce API contracts rate limits quotas and policies appropriate for AIdriven consumption patterns (e.g. bursty traffic longrunning requests tokenbased cost controls).

• Ability to collaborate with Product Security Legal and Architecture partners to ensure responsible compliant and scalable use of AI through APIs.

• Demonstrated judgment in balancing innovation with platform stability particularly when introducing AI capabilities into customer or dealerfacing API products.

• Message brokers such as Kafka RabbitMq AWS SQS AWS SNS Apache ActiveMQ Kinesis Azure Event Hub.

• Datastores such as DynamoDB Aurora PostgreSQL MongoDB Cassandra Redis Elasticsearch MySQL Oracle.

• Application architectural patterns such as MVC Microservices Event-driven etc.

• Deploying software using CI/CD tools such as Jenkins GoCD Azure Devops Confluence etc.

• Experience deploying and maintaining software using public clouds such as AWS or Azure.

• Working within an Agile framework (ideally Scrum).

• Experience designing well-defined Restful APIs

• Experience writing API proxies on platforms such as Apigee Edge AWS API Gateway or Azure API Manager

• Hands one experience with API tools such as Swagger Postman and Assertible

• Test driven development and behavior driven development.

• Hands on experience with testing tools such as Cucumber and their integration into CI/CD pipelines.

• Experience using mocking frameworks and unit test frameworks

• Expertise writing and debugging multi-threaded applications

• Strong analytical skills.

• Must demonstrate solid knowledge of computer science fundamentals like data structures and algorithms and object-oriented design.

• Ability to work under pressure and within time constraints.

• Passion for technology and an eagerness to contribute to a team-oriented environment

• Demonstrated leadership on medium to large-scale projects impacting strategic priorities.

Additional Details:

Up to 15% travel might be required

I am sorry but Sponsorship is not available for this position

Relocation is not available for this position

What You Will Get:

Working with a Fortune 100 leader you can build your career on a global scale and take advantage of development opportunities with emerging technologies. Weve created an inclusive environment for you to explore your passions make an impact and do the work that really matters. Join Us.

About Caterpillar:

Caterpillar Inc. is the worlds leading manufacturer of construction and mining equipment off-highway diesel and natural gas engines industrial gas turbines and diesel-electric locomotives. For nearly 100 years weve been helping customers build a better more sustainable world and are committed and contributing to a reduced-carbon future. Our innovative products and services backed by our global dealer network provide exceptional value that helps customers succeed.

I am sorry but Sponsorship is not available for this position

Relocation is not available for this position

Summary Pay Range:

Compensation and benefits offered may vary depending on multiple individualized factors job level market locationjob-related knowledge skills individual performance and experience. Please note that salary is only one component of total compensation at Caterpillar.

Benefits:

Subject to plan eligibility terms and guidelines. This is a summary list of benefits.

• Medical dental and vision benefits*

• Paid time off plan (Vacation Holidays Volunteer etc.)*

• 401(k) savings plans*

• Health Savings Account (HSA)*

• Flexible Spending Accounts (FSAs)*

• Health Lifestyle Programs*

• Employee Assistance Program*

• Voluntary Benefits and Employee Discounts*

• Career Development*

• Incentive bonus*

• Disability benefits

• Life Insurance

• Parental leave

• Adoption benefits

• Tuition Reimbursement

* These benefits also apply to part-time employees

Posting Dates:

Any offer of employment is conditioned upon the successful completion of a drug screen.

Caterpillar is an Equal Opportunity Employer Including Veterans and Individuals with Disabilities. Qualified applicants of any age are encouraged to apply.

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