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.

Preferred Candidate Profile :

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 Protobuf.

- 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.