Overview :

Key Responsibilities :

- Provide technical leadership, mentorship, and guidance to the API engineering team

- Lead the design, implementation, and evolution of API architecture and backend services

- Champion API-first development, ensuring clear contracts and comprehensive documentation (OpenAPI/Swagger)

- Lead the implementations of APIs conforming to all NFRs including security, scalability, and performance.

- Ensure robust authentication, authorization, and data protection for all endpoints

- Drive adoption of best practices in API design, versioning, and integration

- Optimize API performance for low-latency, high-frequency interactions

- Oversee observability, monitoring, and alerting for all APIs and backend services

- Collaborate closely with product, UI, and runtime teams to deliver integrated solutions

- Collaborate with the SDET to ensure comprehensive test coverage and effective test data creation

- Lead the adoption of modern API tools, frameworks, and best practices

- Ensure engineering rigor, code quality, and documentation standards are met

- Facilitate clear communication, knowledge sharing, and effective documentation within the team

- Support team growth through coaching, feedback, and skills development

Core Qualities & Skills :

- Proven experience leading API or backend engineering teams and delivering complex API projects

- Deep expertise in API architecture, design, and implementation (RESTful, GraphQL, gRPC etc.)

- Strong programming skills in relevant backend languages (e.g., Node.js, Python, Java, Go, etc.)

- Experience with API security, authentication, and authorization (OAuth, JWT, RBAC, PKCE, define fine-grained access controls using ReBAC)

- Experience with API documentation and standards (OpenAPI/Swagger, Use Case, JSON Schemas, etc.)

- Familiarity with data serialization with Protofbuf

- Experience with some API gateway is a must

- Strong understanding of performance optimization, scalability, and reliability for APIs

- Experience with observability, monitoring, and troubleshooting for backend services

- Strong collaboration and alignment skills across disciplines

- Willingness to learn, share knowledge, and adapt to evolving technologies

- System design skills and awareness of technical debt and tradeoffs

- Excellent communication, documentation, and stakeholder management abilities

- Comfort with ambiguity, discovery, and rapid change

- Commitment to engineering excellence, security, and responsible practices

Preferred Qualifications :

- 7+ years of hands-on API or backend engineering experience, with 2+ years in a technical leadership role

- Track record of architecting and delivering scalable, reliable API systems

- Experience with modern development practices (CI/CD, automated testing, code reviews)

- Demonstrated ability to mentor and grow engineers

- Experience working in cross-functional, agile teams

Highly Desirable :

- Experience with API gateways (e.g., Envoy, Kong, Apigee) and service mesh patterns (e.g., Istio)

- Experience with event-driven and streaming architectures (pub/sub, callbacks, Kafka, etc.)

- Experience with cloud-native infrastructure and automated provisioning (e.g., Terraform)

- Experience building developer portals and self-service onboarding for APIs

- Experience with API Gateways (Apache APISIX, KrakenD, .)

- Ability to perform API Domain Modelling with a strong product orientation, aligning technical design with user and business needs

- Experience thriving in fast-paced, ambiguous environments and balancing rapid delivery with technical excellence

- Experience leading or working with distributed, multidisciplinary teams

Success Metrics :

- API response time (median and p95)

- Uptime and reliability of critical services

- Test coverage for API and backend logic

- Developer velocity and time from API design to production

- Time to First Prototype (TTFP)

- Integration lead time for API consumers

- Technical debt reduction and architectural alignment

- Team growth, engagement, and retention

- Stakeholder satisfaction and cross-team collaboration