API Design Lead

API Design Lead Immediate need for a talented API Design Lead. This is a 12+ Months Contract opportunity with long-term potential and is located in Houston, Jersey City, Raleigh (Remote). Please review the job description below.

Key Responsibilities:

Integration Strategy and Architecture: Develop and lead the integration delivery for the Acquisition Platform, ensuring alignment with business objectives and technology standards.

Lead the implementation of scalable and maintainable APIs as products.

Deliver according to architectural blueprints, integration patterns, and best practices to guide development teams.

Collaboration and Stakeholder Engagement: Collaborate with the Product Team, Product Architect and Platform Engineering Lead to understand integration requirements and translate them into technical solutions.

Engage with cross-functional teams to ensure alignment of integration solutions with overall platform goals and enterprise standards.

Implementation and Development Support: Guide and support implementation teams during the development and deployment of integration solutions.

Provide technical leadership and mentorship to development teams, fostering a culture of continuous improvement and innovation.

AI Assisted Development and Agentic Integration: Leverage AI assisted development techniques to accelerate API, integration, and orchestration development.

Co develop integration solutions alongside AI tools to improve design quality, documentation, test coverage, and delivery speed.

Explore and introduce agent based patterns to automate integration tasks, environment interactions, or operational workflows.

External Orientation- Stay current with industry trends and innovations to continuously improve the integration landscape.

For third party integrations, help select the optimal integration pattern and provide rationale, proving through Proof of Concepts or Proof of Value engagements where possible.

Compliance and Security: Ensure integration solutions adhere to enterprise architecture standards, security protocols, and industry regulations.

Conduct security assessments and audits to identify and mitigate risks.

Collaborate with security teams to influence maturity of standards and policies where unique needs of the Acquisition Platform are concerned.

Leadership and Talent Development: Work with the IT leadership team to embrace contemporary ways of working, attract and develop talent across the firm, and leverage economies of scale and shared capabilities.

Promote a culture of collaboration, innovation, and excellence within the integration and development teams.

Identify and address skill gaps, providing training and development opportunities to team members.

Key Requirements and Technology Experience:

API & Microservices Architecture

Enterprise Integration & API Management

Cloud & AWS API Ecosystem

Technical Leadership & Enterprise Delivery

API Security + AI-Assisted Development

API Strategy – vision and plan to extract value from API economy

API and Microservice design principles – API as a Product, Contract First, Bounded Context, High Cohesion, Low Coupling, CQRS, Event Driven Design

API Security – OAuth 2.0, OIDC

API rate limiting, throttling

AI assisted design techniques - prompt engineering and iterative co design with large language models

Responsible AI use - including consideration of security, data exposure, and operational risk

API performance and reliability – memory leak detection, high volume low latency response, fault tolerant design (i.e. circuit breaker pattern)

API observability – distributed tracing, APM telemetry instrumentation

Growth oriented mindset – ability to think beyond constraints of today and identify what is required to build the future

Excellent communication skills – ability to translate needs and issues between tech and product/business teams

Required Experience:

7+ years development experience

Experience guiding developers and designers

Strong API and cloud background

API Management experience with external partners

Experienced in applying Agile methodologies

Enterprise-scale delivery with both onshore and offshore cross functional teams

Experience in financial services, insurance or retirement services industry

AWS Deployment Experience – AWS API Gateway, X-ray, CloudWatch, CloudTrail, ECS, EKS, Lambdas, Event Bridge