API Architect

Description :

Responsibilities :

- Define and evolve API architecture principles, standards, guidelines, and best practices for REST, GraphQL, and event-based APIs.

- Drive API governance processes including versioning, lifecycle management, reuse strategy, security standards, and performance baselines.

- Lead the design of reusable API patterns and common components for integration and platform engineering teams.

- Collaborate with development and DevOps teams to integrate API design and security into CI/CD pipelines.

- Evaluate and implement API management tools and developer portal capabilities (e.g., Kong, AWS API Gateway,

Azure API Management).

- Define authentication, authorization, rate-limiting, caching, observability, and resiliency models for internal and

external-facing APIs.

- Review existing APIs, provide design guidance, and ensure consistency across the enterprise.

- Build reference implementations and API blueprints to accelerate development.

- Help define the enterprise event-driven architecture strategy (Kafka, EventBridge, SNS/SQS, etc.).

- Work with security teams to ensure proper API protection using OAuth2.0, JWT, mTLS, and other protocols.

- Provide technical leadership and mentoring to API developers across platform teams.

- Conduct training sessions, workshops, and documentation for design-first API development.

Qualifications :

- Bachelor's degree in Engineering, Computer Science, or equivalent.

- 5+ years of experience in software engineering with at least 4+ years of hands-on API architecture and integration

experience.

- Expertise in RESTful API design, OpenAPI/Swagger, JSON Schema, and GraphQL specifications.

- Strong programming experience in Node.js, Python, or Java.

- Familiarity with API frameworks and libraries such as Express, FastAPI, Spring Boot, or NestJS.

- Strong understanding of modern authentication protocols OAuth2.0, OpenID Connect, API Keys, mTLS.

- Proven experience with API management platforms Kong, AWS API Gateway, or Azure API Management.

- Hands-on experience with containerized workloads (Docker, Kubernetes) and microservices patterns.

- Familiarity with asynchronous and event-driven APIs (Kafka, SQS, EventBridge).

- Strong documentation and communication skills (diagrams, API specs, wiki authoring).

- Cloud platform experience (AWS, Azure, or GCP) in designing and deploying scalable APIs.

- Knowledge of CI/CD, GitOps, and automation pipelines.

- Experience with observability tools (Prometheus, OpenTelemetry) for API monitoring and tracing.